Tag: ielts reading practice test

TEST 18: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 The Dinosaurs Footprints and Extinction

EVERYBODY knows that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Something big hit the earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice if ironic, symmetry in the idea that a similar impact brought about the dinosaurs’ rise. That is the thesis proposed by Paul Olsen, of Columbia University, and his colleagues in this week’s Science.

Dinosaurs first appeared in the fossil record 230m years ago, during the Triassic period. But they were mostly small, and they shared the earth with lots of other sorts of reptile. It was in the subsequent Jurassic, which began 202 million years ago, that they overran the planet and turned into the monsters depicted in the book and movie “Jurassic Park”. (Actually, though, the dinosaurs that appeared on screen were from the still more recent Cretaceous period.) Dr Olsen and his colleagues are not the first to suggest that the dinosaurs inherited the earth as the result of an asteroid strike. But they are the first to show that the takeover did, indeed, happen in a geological eyeblink.

Dinosaur skeletons are rare. Dinosaur footprints are, however, surprisingly abundant. And the sizes of the prints are as good an indication of the sizes of the beasts as are the skeletons themselves. Dr Olsen and his colleagues, therefore, concentrated on prints, not bones.

The prints in question were made in eastern North America, a part of the world the full of rift valleys to those in East Africa today. Like the modern African rift valleys, the Triassic/Jurassic American ones contained lakes, and these lakes grew and shrank at regular intervals because of climatic changes caused by periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit. (A similar phenomenon is responsible for modern ice ages.) That regularity, combined with reversals in the earth’s magnetic field, which are detectable in the tiny fields of certain magnetic minerals, means that rocks from this place and period can be dated to within a few thousand years. As a bonus, squishy lake-edge sediments are just the things for recording the tracks of passing animals. By dividing the labour between themselves, the ten authors of the paper were able to study such tracks at 80 sites.

The researchers looked at 18 so-called ichnotaxa. These are recognizable types of the footprint that cannot be matched precisely with the species of animal that left them. But they can be matched with a general sort of animal, and thus act as an indicator of the fate of that group, even when there are no bones to tell the story. Five of the ichnotaxa disappear before the end of the Triassic, and four march confidently across the boundary into the Jurassic. Six, however, vanish at the boundary, or only just splutter across it; and there appear from nowhere, almost as soon as the Jurassic begins.

That boundary itself is suggestive. The first geological indication of the impact that killed the dinosaurs was an unusually high level of iridium in rocks at the end of the Cretaceous when the beasts disappear from the fossil record. Iridium is normally rare at the earth’s surface, but it is more abundant in meteorites. When people began to believe the impact theory, they started looking for other Cretaceous-and anomalies. One that turned up was a surprising abundance of fern spores in rocks just above the boundary layer – a phenomenon known as a “fern spike”.

That matched the theory nicely. Many modern ferns are opportunists. They cannot compete against plants with leaves, but if a piece of land is cleared by, say, a volcanic eruption, they are often the first things to set up shop there. An asteroid strike would have scoured much of the earth of its vegetable cover, and provided a paradise for ferns. A fern spike in the rocks is thus a good indication that something terrible has happened.

Both an iridium anomaly and a fern spike appear in rocks at the end of the Triassic, too. That accounts for the disappearing ichnotaxa: the creatures that made them did not survive the holocaust. The surprise is how rapidly the new ichnotaxa appear.

Dr Olsen and his colleagues suggest that the explanation for this rapid increase in size may be a phenomenon called ecological release. This is seen today when reptiles (which, in modern times, tend to be small creatures) reach islands where they face no competitors. The most spectacular example is on the Indonesian island of Komodo, where local lizards have grown so large that they are often referred to as dragons. The dinosaurs, in other words, could flourish only when the competition had been knocked out.

That leaves the question of where the impact happened. No large hole in the earth’s crust seems to be 202m years old. It may, of course, have been overlooked. Old craters are eroded and buried, and not always easy to find. Alternatively, it may have vanished. Although the continental crust is more or less permanent, the ocean floor is constantly recycled by the tectonic processes that bring about continental drift. There is no ocean floor left that is more than 200m years old, so a crater that formed in the ocean would have been swallowed up by now.

There is a third possibility, however. This is that the crater is known, but has been misdated. The Manicouagan “structure”, a crater in Quebec, is thought to be 214m years old. It is huge – some 100km across – and seems to be the largest of between three and five craters that formed within a few hours of each other as the lumps of a disintegrated comet hit the earth one by one.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ Dr Paul Olsen and his colleagues believe that asteroid knock may also lead to dinosaurs’ boom.

2/ Books and movie like Jurassic Park often exaggerate the size of the dinosaurs.

3 /Dinosaur footprints are more adequate than dinosaur skeletons.

4/ The prints were chosen by Dr Olsen to study because they are more detectable than the earth magnetic field to track the date of geological precise within thousands of years.

5/ Ichnotaxa showed that footprints of dinosaurs offer exact information of the trace left by an individual species.

6 We can find more Iridium in the earth’s surface than in meteorites.

Questions 7-13 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage . Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Dr Olsen and his colleagues applied a phenomenon named 7 ……………………to explain the large size of the Eubrontes, which is a similar case to that nowadays reptiles invade a place where there are no 8 …………………… for example, on an island called Komodo, indigenous huge lizards grow so big that people even regarding them as 9 …………………… However, there were no old impact trace being found? The answer may be that we have 10 …………………… . the evidence. Old craters are difficult to spot or it probably 11 …………………… Due to the effect of the earth moving. Even a crater formed in Ocean had been 12 ……………………under the impact of crust movement. Besides, the third hypothesis is that the potential evidence some craters maybe 13 ……………………

PASSAGE 2 Father of modern management

Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters. “Management is an organ of institutions … the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.” Did he succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.

His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has remained in print ever since.

The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.

However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.

There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.

There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.

Questions 1-6

Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

i The popularity and impact of Drucker’s work

ii Finding fault with Drucker

iii The impact of economic globalisation

iv Government regulation of business

v Early publications of Drucker’s

vi Drucker’s view of balanced management

vii Drucker’s rejection of big business

viii An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker’s work

ix The changing role of the employee

1/ Paragraph A

2/ Paragraph B

3/ Paragraph C

4/ Paragraph D

5/ Paragraph E

6/ Paragraph F

Questions 7-10 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 7- 10 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with what is stated in the passage

NO if the statement counters to what is stated in the passage

NOT GIVEN if there is no relevant information given in the passage

7/ Drucker believed the employees should enjoy the same status as the employers in a company

8/ Drucker argued the managers and politicians will dominate the economy during a social transition

9/ Drucker support that workers are not simply put themselves just in the employment relationship and should develop their resources of intelligence voluntarily

10/ Drucker’s work on the management is out of date in moderns days

Questions 11-12 Choose TWO letters from A-E. Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker’s views?

A High-rank executives and workers should be put in balanced positions in management practice

B Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs

C More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.

D Management should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the

outside force

E Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish goals

Questions 13-14 Choose TWO letters from A-E. Write your answers in boxes 13 and 14 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as criticisms to Drucker and his views?

A His lectures focus too much on big organisations and ignore the small ones.

B His lectures are too broad and lack of being precise and accurate about the facts.

C He put a source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.

D He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his own management groups

E He was overstatin

PASSAGE 3 Age-proofing our brains – Making our minds last a lifetime

{A} While it may not be possible to completely age-proof our brains, a brave new world of anti-aging research shows that our gray matter may be far more flexible than we thought. So no one, no matter how old, has to lose their mind. The brain has often been called the three-pound universe. It’s our most powerful and mysterious organ, the seat of the self, laced with as many billions of neurons as the galaxy has stars. No wonder the mere notion of an aging, failing brain–and the prospect of memory loss, confusion, and the unraveling of our personality–is so terrifying. As Mark Williams, M.D., author of The American Geriatrics Society’s Complete Guide to Aging and Health, says, “The fear of dementia is stronger than the fear of death itself.” Yet the degeneration of the brain is far from inevitable. “Its design features are such that it should continue to function for a lifetime,” says Zaven Khachaturian, Ph.D., director of the Alzheimer’s Association’s Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute. “There’s no reason to expect it to deteriorate with age, even though many of us are living longer lives.” In fact, scientists’ view of the brain’s potential is rapidly changing, according to Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. “Thirty-five years ago we thought Alzheimer’s disease was a dramatic version of normal aging . Now we realize it’s a disease with a distinct pathology. In fact, some people simply don’t experience any mental decline, so we’ve begun to study them.’ Antonio Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa and author of Descartes’ Error, concurs. “Older people can continue to have extremely rich and healthy mental lives.’

{B} The seniors were tested in 1988 and again in 1991. Four factors were found to be related to their mental fitness: levels of education and physical activity, lung function, and feelings of self-efficacy. “Each of these elements alters the way our brain functions,” says Marilyn Albert, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues from Yale, Duke, and Brandeis Universities and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who hypothesizes that regular exercise may actually stimulate blood flow to the brain and nerve growth, both of which create more densely branched neurons rendering the neurons stronger and better able to resist disease. Moderate aerobic exercise, including long brisk walks and frequently climbing stairs, will accomplish this.

{C} Education also seems to enhance brain function. People who have challenged themselves with at least a college education may actually stimulate the neurons in their brains. Moreover, native intelligence may protect our brains. It’s possible that smart people begin life with a greater number of neurons, and therefore have a greater reserve to fall back on if some begin to fail. “If you have a lot of neurons and keep them busy, you may be able to tolerate more damage to your brain before it shows,’ says Peter Davies, M.D., of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, Early linguistic ability also seems to help our brains later in life. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 93 elderly nuns and examined the autobiographies they had written 60 years earlier, just as they were joining a convent The nuns whose essays were complex and dense with ideas remained sharp into their eighties and nineties.

{D} Finally, personality seems to play an important role in protecting our mental prowess. A sense of self-efficacy may protect our brain, buffeting it from the harmful effects of stress. According to Albert, there’s evidence that elevated levels of stress hormones may harm brain cells and cause the hippocampus–a small seahorse-shaped organ that’s a crucial moderator of memory–to atrophy. A sense that we can effectively chart our own course in the world may retard the release of stress hormones and protect us as we age. “It’s not a matter of whether you experience stress or not,’ Albert concludes, “it’s your attitude toward it.” Reducing stress by meditating on a regular basis may buffer the brain as well. It also increases the activity of the brain’s pineal gland , the source of the antioxidant hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep and may retard the aging process. Studies at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the University of Western Ontario found that people who meditated regularly had higher levels of melatonin than those who took 5-milligram supplements. Another study, conducted jointly by Maharishi International University, Harvard University, and the University of Maryland, found that seniors who meditated for three months experienced dramatic improvements in their psychological well-being, compared to their non-meditative peers.

{E} Animal studies confirm that both mental and physical activity boost brain fitness. At the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in Urbana, Illinois, psychologist William Greenough, Ph.D., let some rats play with a profusion of toys. These rodents developed about 25 percent more connections between their neurons than did rats that didn’t get any mentally stimulating recreation. In addition, rats that exercised on a treadmill developed more capillaries in specific parts of their brains than did their sedentary counterparts. This increased the blood flow to their brains. “Clearly the message is to do as many different flyings as possible,” Greenough says.

{F} It’s not just scientists who are catching anti-aging fever. Walk into any health food store, and you’ll find nutritional formulas –with names like Brainstorm and Smart ALEC–that claim to sharpen mental ability. The book Smart Drugs & Nutrients, by Ward Dean, M.D., and John Morgenthaler, was self-published in 1990 and has sold over 120,000 copies worldwide. It has also spawned an underground network of people tweaking their own brain chemistry with nutrients and drugs–the latter sometimes obtained from Europe and Mexico. Sales of ginkgo –an extract from the leaves of the 200-million-year-old ginkgo tree, which has been shown in published studies to increase oxygen in the brain and ameliorate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease–are up by 22 percent in the last six months alone, according to Paddy Spence, president of SPINS, a San Francisco-based market research firm. Indeed, products that increase and preserve mental performance are a small but emerging segment of the supplements industry, says Linda Gilbert, president of HealthFocus, a company that researches consumer health trends. While neuroscientists like Khachaturian liken the use of these products to the superstition of tossing salt over your shoulder, the public is nevertheless gobbling up nutrients that promise cognitive enhancement.

Questions 28-31 Choose the Four correct letters among A-G . Write your answers in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet. Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assisting the Brains’ function?

(A) Preventive treatment against Alzheimer’s disease

(B) Doing active aerobic exercise and frequently climbing stairs

(D) Early verbal or language competence training

(E) Having more supplements such as ginkgo tree

(F) Participate in more physical activity involving in stimulating tasks

(G) Personality and feelings of self-fulfillment

Questions 32-39

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-G) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 32-39 on your answer sheet.

NB you may use any latter more than once

(A) Zaven Khachaturian

(B) William Greenough

(D) Robert Sapolsky

(E) Linda Gilbert

(F) Peter Davies

(G) Paddy Spence

(32) Alzheimer’s was probably a kind of disease rather than a normal aging process.

(33) Keeping neurons busy, people may be able to endure more harm to your brain

(34) Regular exercises boost blood flow to the brain and increase anti-disease disability.

(35) Significant increase of Sales of ginkgo has been shown.

(36) More links between their neurons are found among stimulated animals.

(37) Effectiveness of the use of brains supplements products can be of little scientific proof.

(38) Heightened levels of stress may damage brain cells and cause part of brain to deteriorate.

(39) Products that upgrade and preserve mental competence are still a newly developing industry.

Questions 40. Choose the correct letters among A-D Write your answers in box 40 on your answer sheet.

According to the passage, what is the most appropriate title for this passage?

(A) Making our minds last a lifetime

(B) amazing pills of the ginkgo

(D) more able a brain and neurons

READING TESTS

TEST 17: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 Consecutive and Simultaneous Translation

{A}

When people are faced with a foreign-language barrier, the usual way around it is to find someone to interpret or translate for them. The term ‘translation’, is the neutral term used for all tasks where the meaning of expressions in one language (the source language) is turned into the meaning of another (the ‘target’ language), whether the medium is spoken, written, or signed. In specific professional contexts, however, a distinction is drawn between people who work with the spoken or signed language (interpreters), and those who work with the written language (translators). There are certain tasks that blur this distinction, as when source speeches turned into target writing. But usually the two roles are seen as quite distinct, and it is unusual to find one person who is equally happy with both occupations. Some writers on translation, indeed, consider the interpreting task to be more suitable for extrovert personalities, and the translating task for introverts.

{B}

Interpreting is today widely known from its use in international political life. When senior ministers from different language backgrounds meet, the television record invariably shows a pair of interpreters hovering in the background. At major conferences, such as the United Nations General Assembly, the presence of headphones is a clear indication that a major linguistic exercise is taking place. In everyday circumstances, interpreters are frequently needed, especially in cosmopolitan societies formed by new reiterations of immigrants and Gastarbeiter. Often, the business of law courts, hospitals, local health clinics, classrooms, or industrial tribunals cannot be carried on without the presence of an interpreter. Given the importance and frequency of this task, therefore, it is remarkable that so little study has been made of what actually happens when interpreting takes place, and of how successful an exercise it is.

{C}

There are two main kinds of oral translation – consecutive and simultaneous In consecutive translation the translating starts after the original speech or some part of it has been completed. Here the interpreter’s strategy and the final results depend, to a great extent on the length of the segment to be translated. If the segment is just a sentence or two the interpreter closely follows the original speech. As often as not, however, the interpreter is expected to translate a long speech which has lasted for scores of minutes or even longer. In this case he has to remember a great number of messages, and keep them in mind until he begins his translation. To make this possible the interpreter has to take notes of the original messages, various systems of notation having been suggested for the purpose. The study of, and practice in, such notation is the integral part of the interpreter’s training as are special exercises to develop his memory.

{D}

Doubtless the recency of developments in the field partly explains this neglect. One procedure, consecutive interpreting, is very old — and presumably dates from the Tower of Babel! Here, the interpreter translates after the speaker has finished speaking. This approach is widely practiced in informal situations, as well as in committees and small conferences. In larger and more formal settings, however, it has been generally replaced by simultaneous interpreting — a recent development that arose from the availability of modern audiological equipment and the advent of increased international interaction following the Second World War.

{E}

Of the two procedures, it is the second that has attracted most interest, because of the complexity of the task and the remarkable skills required. In no other context of human communication is anyone routinely required to listen and speak at the same time, preserving an exact semantic correspondence between the two modes. Moreover, there is invariably a delay of a few words between the stimulus and the response, because of the time it takes to assimilate what is being said in the source language and to translate it into an acceptable form in the target language. This ‘ear-voice span’ is usually about 2 or 3 seconds, but it may be as much as 10 seconds or so, if the text is complex. The brain has to remember what has just been said, attend to what is currently being said, and anticipate the construction of what is about to be said. As you start a sentence you are taking a leap in the dark, you are mortgaging your grammatical future; the original sentence may suddenly be turned in such a way that your translation of its end cannot easily be reconciled ( with your translation of its start. Great nimbleness is called for

{F}

How it is all done is not at all clear. That it is done at all is a source of some wonder, given the often lengthy periods of interpreting required, the confined environment of an interpreting booth, the presence of background noise, and the awareness that major decisions may depend upon the accuracy of the work. Other considerations such as cultural background also make it aim to pay full attention to the backgrounds of the authors and the recipients and to take into account differences between source and target language.

{G}

Research projects have now begun to look at these factors – to determine, for example, how far successful interpreting is affected by poor listening conditions or the speed at which the source language is spoken. It seems that an input speed of between 100 and 120 words per minute is a comfortable rate for interpreting, with an upper limit of around 200 w.p.m. But even small increases in speed can dramatically affect the accuracy of output. In one controlled study, when speeds were gradually increased in a series of stages from 95 to 164 w.p.m., the ear-voice span also increased with each stage, and the amount correctly interpreted showed a clear decline. Also, as the translating load increases, not only are there more errors of commission (mistranslations, cases of vagueness replacing precision), there are also more errors of omission, as words and segments of meaning are filtered out. These are important findings, given the need for accuracy in international communication. What is needed is a more detailed identification of the problem areas, and of the strategies speakers, listeners, and interpreters use to solve them. There is an urgent need to expand what has so far been one of the most neglected fields of communication research.

Questions 1-5

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

Question 1/ In which way does author state translation at the beginning of the passage?

A abstract and concrete meaning

B general and specific meaning

C several examples of translation’s meaning

D different meaning in various profession

Question 2/ Application of headphone in a UN conference tells us that:

A TV show is being conducted

B radio program is on the air

C two sides are debating

D language practice is in the process

Question 3/ In the passage, what is the author’s purpose in citing the Tower of Babel?

A interpreting secret is stored in the Tower

B interpreter emerged exactly from time of Tower of Babel

C consecutive interpreting has a long history

D consecutive interpreting should be abandoned

Question 4/ About simultaneous interpreting, which of the following is TRUE?

A it is an old and disposable interpretation method

B it doesn’t need outstanding professional ability

C it relies on professional equipment

D it takes less than two seconds ear-voice span

Question 5/ In consecutive translation, if the section is longer than expected, what would an interpreter most probably do?

A he or she has to remember some parts ahead

B he or she has to break them down first

C he or she has to respond as quickly as possible

D he or she has to remember all parts ahead

Questions 6-9 Summary

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words or a number from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet. The cycle from ear to voice normally lasts about 6 ……………………, which depends on the sophistication of paper, for example, it could go up to 7 …………………… sometimes. When experts took close research on affecting elements, they found appropriate speaking speed is somehow among 8 …………………… w.p.m. In a specific experiment, the accuracy of interpretation dropped while the ear-voice span speed increased between 95 to 164 w.p.m. However, the maximum speed was about 9 ……………………w.p.m.

Questions 10-13

Choose FOUR correct letters. Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

Which FOUR of the following are the factors that affect interpreting?

A mastery in structure and grammar of sentence in the script

B speed of incoming sound source

C noisy of background

D emotional states of interpreter

E culture of different backgrounds

F understanding the significance of being precise

G upper volume limit of speakers

Questions 1-4 The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 See grass turned to be more resistant to the saline water level in the Bay.

2 Significance of finding a specific reason in controversy

3 Expensive proposals raised to solve the nitrogen dilemma

4 A statistic of ecological changes in both the coral area and species

Questions 5-8

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.

A Bill Kruczynski

B Brian Lapointe

C Joseph Zieman

5/ Drainage system in everglades actually results in high salty water in the bay

6/ Restoring water high in nitrogen level will make more ecological side effect

7/ High nitrogen levels may be caused by the nearby farmland.

8/ Released sewage rather than nutrients from agricultural area increase the level of Nitrogen.

Questions 9-13: Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

9/ Everyone agrees with “pouring water into the sea is harmless enough” even in the Florida Bay area.

10/ Nitrogen was poured in from different types of crops as water flows through.

11/ Everglade restoration project can be effective regardless of the cause of the pollution.

12/ Human has changed Florida Bay where old image before 1950s is unrecalled.

13/ Tourism contributes fundamentally to the Florida Bay area.

PASSAGE 3 Artists’ Fingerprints

Works of art often bear the fingerprints of the artist who created them. Such crucial evidence usually goes unnoticed even by connoisseurs, art experts, and conservators. If present, such evidence could be valuable in clarifying questions about authorship and dating.

{A} The unique character of ridges on our hands has been recognized for thousands of years. The study of ancient pottery for example reveals the utilization of fingerprint impressions in the clay as a maker’s mark. In prehistoric times, we find examples of handprints in cave paintings. Only as recently as 1858 did Sir William Herschel establish its use for identification. In 1888, Sir Francis Galton undertook to refine and formulate Herschel’s observations. Identification by fingerprint was first adopted in England in 1905 and received general acceptance worldwide in 1908.

{B} The combination of a number of characteristics in a given finger impression is specific to a particular print. The placing of reliance on fingerprint evidence has always been on the assumption that no two fingers can have identical ridge characteristics. Galton’s mathematical conclusions predicted the possible existence of some 64 billion different fingerprint patterns. The functionality of this technique is that the probability for the existence of two identical finger impressions from different individuals is nil and no such possibility has ever been noticed in any part of the world at any time.

{C} The individuality of a fingerprint is not determined by its general shape or pattern but by the careful study of its ridge characteristics. Since at a scene of the crime, usually only partial prints are found, comparison of a relatively small number of characteristics is accepted in legal practice. In a judicial proceeding, a point-by-point comparison must be demonstrated by the fingerprint expert. This is exactly the principle that must be followed in art-related fingerprint issues.

{D} Artists in the area of the visual arts use their hands for creation. Their tools, such as brushes often isolate them from the surface they are working on. Inaccurate deposits of paint are often corrected by modelling with the fingertip. Some artists used the fingertip to soften the marks left by the brush by gently tapping or stroking the still wet surface. In some instances, the fingertip was used for literally ‘stamping’ the fine network of ridges onto the painting.

{E} The eventual authentication of a painting by J. M. W. Turner entitled Landscape with Rainbow in 1993 is a good illustration of the process. The painting was discovered in the early 1980s. Biros took the painting to the Tate Gallery, in London, to show it to the world’s leading Turner experts and connoisseurs. The verdict was unanimous – the painting was a tattered imitation. However, fingerprint evidence was discovered on the painting during restoration, appropriately documented, and re-examined by a veteran expert from the RCMP. A match was found between a fingerprint on “Landscape with Rainbow and fingerprints photographed on another Turner painting, ‘Chichester Canal’. When an independent fingerprint examination by John Manners of the West Yorkshire Police confirmed the conclusions that the fingerprints on both paintings were identical, the unbelievers changed their minds. In addition, it is well known that Turner always worked alone and had no assistants. This reduces the chances of accidental contribution substantially. The painting, originally bought for a few hundred dollars, finally sold for close to $200,000 at auction at Phillips in London in 1995.

{F} In 1998, three envelopes containing old correspondence had been purchased in an antique shop. One of the envelopes postmarked April 2, 1915, was found to contain a drawing folded in half. The drawing depicts a woman’s head. It is executed in red chalk with an inscription written in reverse with brown ink. The design is faded and worn. Some spots suggest foxing and subsequent discolouration. The paper is yellowed and contaminated.

{G} The newly discovered design bears great similarity to that of the Head of St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci, (RL 12533) in the Windsor Collection since 1629. The medium is different, red chalk being used instead of black. The scale of the two images is different so offsetting (copying by contact transference) is not a satisfactory explanation for the new drawing. When the paper was first examined, several fingerprints were noticed on the verso. One of them was found clear and containing many ridges suitable for comparison, however, no analysis was done at the time due to the lack of reference material. Many of Leonardo’s works are not easily accessible and fingerprint data either does not exist or is not published.

{H} By chance, on March 30, 1999, several clear and usable fingerprints were found on an unusually good detail photo in a publication on Leonardo. The photograph of Leonardo’s St Jerome, in the Vatican Museum, revealed no less than 16 partial fingertip marks. The importance of this is that the fingerprints are left in the still-wet paint and without doubt, the use of the fingertip served to model paint. Since the authorship of the painting of St Jerome is unquestioned by scholarship and has always been ascribed to Leonardo, the conclusion that these fingerprints are his would be hard to argue against.

{I} The fingerprints on the St Jerome illustration were scanned and enlarged so comparisons could be made with the fingerprint on the newly discovered drawing. One of them proved to match. The result of our analyses was presented on March 31, 1999, to fingerprint examiner Staff Sergeant André Turcotte for an independent assessment. He agreed with the findings and confirmed the conclusion. The fingerprint on the St Jerome painting in the Vatican and the newly discovered drawing were created by the same finger.

{J] Remember, the authentication approach should rest on strict considerations and rigorous methodology. Only prints that are clearly from the original creative process are admitted for consideration. The reference samples should ideally come from unquestioned works of art with good provenance. Spurious contributors must be eliminated such as assistants who may have touched the painting while still wet. A match is never

Questions 1-4

The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1/ Mention of fingerprint identification in the legal process.

2 /The author’s advice on fingerprint authentication of arts.

3/ The use of fingerprints in ancient times.

4/ The medium comparison between two drawings.

Questions 5-9 Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-I below.

Write the correct letters in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.

5/ The fingerprint in ancient pottery

6/ The science of fingerprint identification

7 /The authentication of a painting without a signature

8/ Landscape with Rainbow

9/ When painting, artists

(A) might use fingers to remove unwanted paint left by brushes.

(B) revealed the utilization of clay.

(D) was left to identify the person who made it.

(E) was restored at a high expense.

(F) was finally determined at an appropriate price.

(G) has been accepted as a reliable system available.

(H) was preserved at the Windsor Collection.

(I) could be authenticated by comparing fingerprints from other sources.

Questions 10-12 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D. Write your answers in boxes 10-12 on your answer sheet.

Question 10: The attribution of Landscape with Rainbow to Turner

A was in overwhelming consensus at the beginning.

B was first brought forward by the West Yorkshire Police.

C was rejected by the Biros.

D was not exactly located for years.

Question 11:- The drawing of a woman’s head contained in the envelope

A was finished in 1915.

B was executed in brown ink.

C was in poor condition.

D was folded for protection.

Question 12:- The drawing of The Head of St Anne

A is the work of Leonardo da Vinci

B is softer due to fading and contamination.

C bears some fingerprints on the verso.

D is in the Vatican Museum

READING TESTS

TEST 16: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 : video games Unexpected Benefits to Human Brain

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played his first video game years ago when his six-year-old son Sam was playing Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. He wanted to play the game so he could support Sam’s problem solving. Though Pajama Sam is not an “educational game”, it is replete with the types of problems psychologists study when they study thinking and learning. When he saw how well the game held Sam’s attention, he wondered what sort of beast a more mature video game might be.

Video and computer games, like many other popular, entertaining and addicting kid’s activities, are looked down upon by many parents as time-wasters, and worse, parents think that these games rot the brain. Violent video games are readily blamed by the media and some experts as the reason why some youth become violent or commit extreme anti-social behavior. Recent content analyses of video games show that as many as 89% of games contain some violent content, but there is no form of aggressive content for 70% of popular games. Many scientists and psychologists, like James Paul Gee, find that video games actually have many benefits – the main one being making kids smart. Video games may actually teach kids high-level thinking skills that they will need in the future.

“Video games change your brain,” according to University of Wisconsin psychologist Shawn Green. Video games change the brain’s physical structure the same way as do learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating using a map. Much like exercise can build muscle, the powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which strengthens neural circuits, can build the player’s brain.

Video games give your child’s brain a real workout. In many video games, the skills required to win involve abstract and high level thinking. These skills are not even taught at school. Some of the mental skills trained by video games include: following instructions, problem solving, logic, hand-eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills. Research also suggests that people can learn iconic, spatial, and visual attention skills from video games. There have been even studies with adults showing that experience with video games is related to better surgical skills. Jacob Benjamin, doctor from Beth Israel Medical Center NY, found a direct link between skill at video gaming and skill at keyhole or laparoscopic surgery. Also, a reason given by experts as to why fighter pilots of today are more skillful is that this generation’s pilots are being weaned on video games.

The players learn to manage resources that are limited, and decide the best use of resources, the same way as in real life. In strategy games, for instance, while developing a city, an unexpected surprise like an enemy might emerge. This forces the player to be flexible and quickly change tactics. Sometimes the player does this almost every second of the game giving the brain a real workout. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist, games simulating stressful events such as those found in battle or action games could be a training tool for real-world situations. The study suggests that playing action video games primes the brain to make quick decisions. Video games can be used to train soldiers and surgeons, according to the study. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture, says gamers must deal with immediate problems while keeping their long-term goals on their horizon. Young gamers force themselves to read to get instructions, follow storylines of games, and get information from the game texts.

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that playing a video game is similar to working through a science problem Like students in a laboratory, gamers must come up with a hypothesis. For example, players in some games constantly try out combinations of weapons and powers to use to defeat an enemy. If one does not work, they change hypothesis and try the next one. Video games are goal- driven experiences, says Gee, which are fundamental to learning. Also, using math skills is important to win in many games that involve quantitative analysis like managing resources. In higher levels of a game, players usually fail the first time around, but they keep on trying until they succeed and move on to the next level.

Many games are played online and involve cooperation with other online players in order to win. Video and computer games also help children gain self-confidence and many games are based on history, city building, and governance and so on. Such games indirectly teach children about aspects of life on earth.

In an upcoming study in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations. The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the fast-paced action video games “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game “The Sims 2.” After this training period, all of the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The action game players were up to 25 percent faster at coming to a conclusion and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy game playing peers.

Questions 1-4 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1/ What is the main purpose of paragraph one

A Introduction of professor James Paul Gee.

B Introduction of the video game: Pajamas Sam.

C Introduction of types of video games.

D Introduction of the background of this passage.

2/ What does the author want to express in the second paragraph

A Video games are widely considered harmful for children’s brain.

B Most violent video games are the direct reason of juvenile delinquency.

C Even there is a certain proportion of violence in most video games; scientists and psychologists see its

benefits of children’s intellectual abilities.

D Many parents regard video games as time-wasters, which rot children’s brain.

3/ What is correctly mentioned in paragraph four

A Some schools use video games to teach students abstract and high level thinking.

B Video games improves the brain ability in various aspects.

C Some surgeons have better skills because they play more video games.

D Skillful fighter pilots in this generation love to play video games.

4/ What is the expectation of the experiment the three researchers did

A Gamers have to make the best use of the limited resource.

B Gamers with better math skills will win in the end.

C Strategy game players have better ability to make quick decisions.

D Video games help increase the speed of players’ reaction effectively.

Questions 5-8 In boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

5/ Most video games are popular because of their violent content.

6/ The action game players minimized the percentage of making mistakes in the experiment.

7/ It would be a good idea for schools to apply video games in their classrooms.

8 /Those People who are addicted to video games have lots of dopamine in their brains.

Questions 9-13

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters, A-F, in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

A. The writer’s opinion

B. James Paul Gee

C. Shawn Green

D. Daphne Bavelier

E . Steven Johnson

F . Jacob Benjamin

9/ Video games as other daily life skills alter the brain’s physical structure.

10/ Brain is ready to make decisions without hesitation when players are immersed in playing stressful games.

11/ The purpose-motivated experience that video games offer plays an essential role in studying.

12/ Players are good at tackling prompt issues with future intensions.

13/ It helps children broaden their horizon in many aspects and gain self-confidence.

Questions 1-5 Summary: Complete the Summary paragraph below. In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write the correct answer with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

The result of Ekman’s study demonstrates that fear and surprise are persistently 1 ……………….. and made a conclusion that some facial expressions have something to do with certain 2 ………………… Which is impossible covered, despite of 3 ……………….. and whether the culture has been 4 ……………….. or 5 ……………….. to the mainstream.

Questions 6-11

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H, Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

6/ the difficulty identifying the actual meaning of facial expressions

7/ the importance of culture on facial expressions is initially described

8/ collected data for the research on the relation between blink and the success in elections

9/ the features on the sociality of several facial expressions

10/ an indicator to reflect one’s extent of nervousness

11/ the relation between emotion and facial expressions

Questions 12-13

Choose two letters from the A-E

Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet

Which Two of the following statements are true according to Ekman’s theory?

A/ No evidence shows animals have their own facial expressions.

B/ The potential relationship between facial expression and state of mind exists

C/ Facial expressions are concerning different cultures.

D/ Different areas on face convey a certain state of mind.

E/ Mind controls men’s facial expressions more obvious than women’s

PASSAGE 3 Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children’s and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in die Grimm’s’ collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remain unrivalled to this day.

Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves. Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany had been overrun by the French under Napoleon, who was intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of serving the endangered oral tradition of Germany.

For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence.

Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children’s and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children’s literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare. In the Grimms’ hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil.

In the 20th century the Grimms’ fairy tales have come to rule the bookshelves of children’s bedrooms. The stories read like dreams come true: handsome lads and beautiful damsels, armed with magic, triumph over giants and witches and wild beasts. They outwit mean, selfish adults. Inevitably the boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. And parents keep reading because they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents. According to the Grimms, the collection served as “a manual of manners”.

Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travellers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasure was “Aschenputtel” -Cinderella. Marie Hassenpflug was a 20-year- old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Snow White”, and “Sleeping Beauty”, among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian tales.

Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rolleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, creative energy—these are Teutonic traits. The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also coloured the narratives. Throughout Europe, children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hansel and Gretel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in “The Six Swans”. “The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimm’s fantasy”, Rolleke points out” It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times”.

The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the “universal style” of the writing, you have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless,” The tales allow us to express ‘our utopian longings’,” says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigour of the original text. They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.”

Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic of the Grimms’ stories, calling fairy tales the “great comforters. By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim’s theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren’t interested in exercising their unconsciousness. The Grimm tales, in fact, please in an infinite number of ways, something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. The flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ The Grimm brothers believed they would achieve international fame.

2/ The Grimm brothers were forced to work in secret.

3/ Some parents today still think Grimm fairy tales are not suitable for children.

4/ The first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales sold more widely in England than in Germany.

5/ Adults like reading Grimm’s fairy tales for reasons different from those of children.

6/ The Grimm brothers based the story “Cinderella” on the life of Dorothea Viehmann

Questions 7-9

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.

7./ In paragraph 4, what changes happened at that time in Europe?

A Literacy levels of the population increased.

B The development of printing technology made it easier to publish.

C Schools were open to children.

D People were fond of collecting superb picture books.

8./ What changes did the Grimm Brothers make in later editions?

A They made the stories shorter.

B They used more oral language.

C The content of the tales became less violent.

D They found other origins of the tales.

9./ What did Marie Hassenpflug contribute to the Grimm’s Fairy tales?

A She wrote stories.

B She discussed the stories with them.

C She translated a popular book for the brothers using her talent for languages.

D She told the oral stories that were based on traditional Italian stories.

Questions 10-14

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet.

10/ Heinz Rolleke said the Grimm’s tales are “German” because the tales

11/ Heinz Rolleke said the abandoned children in tales

12/ Bernhard Lauer said the writing style of the Grimm brothers is universal because they

13/ Jack Zipes said the pursuit of happiness in the tales means they

14/ Bruno Bettelheim said the therapeutic value of the tales means that the fairy tales

A reflect what life was like at that time

B help children deal with their problems

C demonstrate the outdated system

D tell of the simplicity of life in the German countryside

E encourage people to believe that they can do anything

F recognize the heroes in the real life

G contribute to the belief in nature power

H avoid details about characters’ social settings.

READING TESTS

TEST 14: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 Rural transport plan of “Practical action

For more than 40 years, Practical Action has worked with poor communities to identify the types of transport that work best, taking into consideration culture, needs and skills. With our technical and practical support, isolated rural communities can design, build and maintain their own solutions.

Whilst the focus of National Development Plans in the transport sector lies heavily in the areas of extending road networks and bridges, there are still major gaps identified in addressing the needs of poorer communities. There is a need to develop and promote the sustainable use of alternative transport systems and intermediate means of transportation (IMTs) that complement the linkages of poor people with road networks and other socio-economic infrastructures to improve their livelihoods.

On the other hand, the development of all weathered roads (only 30 percent of the rural population have access to this so far) and motorable bridges are very costly for a country with a small and stagnant economy. In addition, these interventions are not always favourable in all geographical contexts environmentally, socially and economically. More than 60 percent of the network is concentrated in the lowland areas of the country. Although there are a number of alternative ways by which transportation and mobility needs of rural communities in the hills can be addressed, a lack of clear government focus and policies, lack of fiscal and economic incentives, lack of adequate technical knowledge and manufacturing capacities have led to under- development of this alternative transport sub-sector including the provision of IMTs.

One of the major causes of poverty is isolation. Improving the access and mobility of the isolated poor paves the way for access to markets, services and opportunities. By improving transport poorer people are able to access markets where they can buy or sell goods for income, and make better use of essential services such as health and education. No proper roads or vehicles mean women and children are forced to spend many hours each day attending to their most basic needs, such as collecting water and firewood. This valuable time could be used to tend crops, care for the family, study or develop small business ideas to generate much-needed income. Road building

Without roads, rural communities are extremely restricted. Collecting water and firewood, and going to local markets is a huge task, therefore it is understandable that the construction of roads is a major priority for many rural communities. Practical Action is helping to improve rural access/transport infrastructures through the construction and rehabilitation of short rural roads, small bridges, culverts and other transport-related functions. The aim is to use methods that encourage community-driven development. This means villagers can improve their own lives through better access to markets, health care, education and other economic and social opportunities, as well as bringing improved services and supplies to the now-accessible villages. Driving forward new ideas

Practical Action and the communities we work with are constantly crafting and honing new ideas to help poor people. Cycle trailers have practical business use too, helping people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale. Not only that, but those on the poverty-line can earn a decent income by making, maintaining and operating bicycle taxis. With Practical Action’s know-how, Sri Lanka communities have been able to start a bus service and maintain the roads along which it travels. The impact has been remarkable. This service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation. Quick and affordable, it gives them a reliable way to travel to the nearest town; and now their children can get an education, making it far more likely they’ll find a path out of poverty. Practical Action is also an active member of many national and regional networks through which exchange of knowledge and advocating based on action research are carried out and one conspicuous example is the Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement. Sky-scraping transport system

For people who live in remote, mountainous areas, getting food to market in order to earn enough money to survive is a serious issue. The hills are so steep that travelling down them is dangerous. A porter can help but they are expensive, and it would still take hours or even a day. The journey can take so long that their goods start to perish and become worthless and less. Practical Action has developed an ingenious solution called an aerial ropeway. It can either operate by gravitation force or with the use of external power. The ropeway consists of two trolleys rolling over support tracks connected to a control cable in the middle which moves in a traditional flywheel system. The trolley at the top is loaded with goods and can take up to 120kg. This is pulled down to the station at the bottom, either by the force of gravity or by an external power. The other trolley at the bottom is, therefore, pulled upwards automatically. The external power can be produced by a micro-hydro system if access to an electricity grid is not an option. Bringing people on board

Practical Action developed a two-wheeled iron trailer that can be attached (via a hitch behind the seat) to a bicycle and be used to carry heavy loads (up to around 200 kgs) of food, water or even passengers. People can now carry three times as much as before and still pedal the bicycle. The cycle trailers are used for transporting goods by local producers, as ambulances, as mobile shops, and even as mobile libraries. They are made in small village workshops from iron tubing, which is cut, bent, welded and drilled to make the frame and wheels. Modifications are also carried out to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers. The two- wheeled ‘ambulance’ is made from moulded metal, with standard rubber-tyred wheels. The “bed” section can be padded with cushions to make the patient comfortable, while the “seat” section allows a family member to attend to the patient during transit. A dedicated bicycle is needed to pull the ambulance trailer, so that other community members do not need to go without the bicycles they depend on in their daily lives. A joining mechanism allows for easy removal and attachment. In response to user comments, a cover has been designed that can be added to give protection to the patient and attendant in poor weather. Made of treated cotton, the cover is durable and waterproof.

Questions 1-4

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage ?

In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ A slow-developing economy often can not afford some road networks, especially for those used regardless of weather conditions.

2/ Rural communities’ officials know how to improve alternative transport technically.

3/ The primary aim for Practical Action to improve rural transport infrastructures is meant to increase the trade among villages.

4/ Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement provided service that Practical Action highly involved in.

Questions 5-8

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

5/ What is the first duty for many rural communities to reach unrestricted development?

6/ What was one of the new ideas to help poor people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale?

7/ What service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation in Sri Lanka?

8/ What solution had been applied for people who live in remote mountainous areas getting food to market?

Questions 9-13

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

Besides normal transport task, changes are also implemented to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers when it was used on a medical emergency or a moveable 9 ……………………..; ‘Ambulance’ is made from metal, with rubber wheels and drive-by another bicycle. When put with 10 ……………………..; in the two-wheeled ‘ambulance’, the patient can stay comfortable and which another 11 ……………………..;. can sit on caring for the patient in transport journey. In order to dismantle or attach other equipment, and assembling 12 ……………………..; is designed. Later, as users suggest, 13 ……………………..; has also been added to give protection to the patient.

PASSAGE 2 Follow your nose

Aromatherapy is the most widely used complementary therapy in the National Health Service, and doctors use it most often for treating dementia. For elderly patients who have difficulty interacting verbally, and to whom conventional medicine has little to offer, aromatherapy can bring benefits in terms of better sleep, improved motivation, and less disturbed behaviour. So the thinking goes. But last year, a systematic review of health care databases found almost no evidence that aromatherapy is effective in the treatment of dementia. Other findings suggest that aromatherapy works only if you believe it will. In fact, the only research that has unequivocally shown it to have an effect has been carried out on animals.

Behavioural studies have consistently shown that odours elicit emotional memories far more readily than other sensory cues. And earlier this year, Rachel Herz, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues peered into people’s heads using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to corroborate that. They scanned the brains of five women while they either looked at a photo of a bottle of perfume that evoked a pleasant memory for them, or smelled that perfume. One woman, for instance, remembered how as a child living in Paris—she would watch with excitement as her mother dressed to go out and sprayed herself with that perfume. The women themselves described the perfume as far more evocative than the photo, and Herz and co-workers found that the scent did indeed activate the amygdala and other brain regions associated with emotion processing far more strongly than the photograph. But the interesting thing was that the memory itself was no better recalled by the odour than by the picture. “People don’t remember any more detail or with any more clarity when the memory is recalled with an odour,” she says. “However, with the odour, you have this intense emotional feeling that’s really visceral.”

That’s hardly surprising, Herz thinks, given how the brain has evolved. “The way I like to think about it is that emotion and olfaction are essentially the same thing,” she says. “The part of the brain that controls emotion literally grew out of the part of the brain that controls smell.” That, she says, probably explains why memories for odours that are associated with intense emotions are so strongly entrenched in us, because smell was initially a survival skill: a signal to approach or to avoid.

Eric Vermetten, a psychiatrist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, says that doctors have long known about the potential of smells to act as traumatic reminders, but the evidence has been largely anecdotal. Last year, he and others set out to document it by describing three cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in which patients reported either that a certain smell triggered their flashbacks, or that a smell was a feature of the flashback itself. The researchers concluded that odours could be made use of in exposure therapy, or for reconditioning patients’ fear responses.

After Vermetten presented his findings at a conference, doctors in the audience told him how they had turned this association around and put it to good use. PTSD patients often undergo group therapy, but the therapy itself can expose them to traumatic reminders. “Some clinicians put a strip of vanilla or a strong, pleasant, everyday odorant such as coffee under their patients’ noses, so that they have this continuous olfactory stimulation.” says Vermetten. So armed, the patients seem to be better protected against flashbacks. It’s purely anecdotal, and nobody knows what’s happening in the brain, says Vermetten, but it’s possible that the neural pathways by which the odour elicits the pleasant, everyday memory override the fear-conditioned neural pathways that respond to verbal cues.

According to Herz, the therapeutic potential of odours could lie in their very unreliability. She has shown with her perfume-bottle experiment that they don’t guarantee any better recall, even if the memories they elicit feel more real. And there’s plenty of research to show that our noses can be tricked, because being predominantly visual and verbal creatures, we put more faith in those other modalities. In 2001, for instance, Gil Morrot, of the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, tricked 54 oenology students by secretly colouring a white wine with an odourless red dye just before they were asked to describe the odours of a range of red and white wines. The students described the coloured wine using terms typically reserved for red wines. What’s more, just like experts, they used terms alluding to the wine’s redness and darkness—visual rather than olfactory qualities. Smell, the researchers concluded, cannot be separated from the other senses.

Last July, Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience in London took that research a step fur

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A—G

Choose the correct heading for paragraph A, C, D, E and G from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number i—ix in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Questions 19 – 24

Look at the following findings (Questions 19-24) and the list of researchers

Match each finding with the correct researcher, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 19-24 on your answer sheet.

A. Rachel Hertz

B. Eric Vermetten

C. Gil Morrot

D. Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan

NB You may use any letter more than once.

19/ Smell can trigger images of horrible events.

20/ Memory cannot get sharper by smell.

21/ When people are given an odour and a picture of something to learn, they will respond more quickly in naming the smell because the stimulus is stronger when two or more senses are involved.

22/ Pleasant smells counteract unpleasant recollections.

23/ It is impossible to isolate smell from visual cues.

24/ The part of brain that governs emotion is more stimulated by a smell than an image.

25/ In the article, what is the opinion about the conventional method of aromatherapy?

A. Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils extracted from plants.

B. Evidence has proved that aromatherapy is effective in treating dementia.

C. People who feel aromatherapy is effective believe it is useful.

D. Aromatherapy is especially helpful for elderly patients.

26/ What is Rachel Hertz’s conclusion?

A. The area of the brain which activates emotion has the same physiological structure as the part controlling olfaction.

B. We cannot depend on smell, and people have more confidence in sight and spoken or written words.

C. Odours can recall real memories even after the perfume-bottle experiment.

D. Smell has proved its therapeutic effect over a long time span.

PASSAGE 3 Personality and appearance

When Charles Darwin applied to be the “energetic young man” that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain, sought as his gentleman companion, he was almost let down by a woeful shortcoming that was as plain as the nose on his face. Fitzroy believed in physiognomy—the idea that you can tell a person’s character from their appearance. As Darwin’s daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy had “made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy”. This was hardly the case. Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s visage compensated for his sluggardly proboscis: “His brow saved him.”

The idea that a person’s character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin’s day, they were more or less taken as given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.

First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement about its owner’s character—caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on. Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. People also act on these snap judgements. Politicians with competent- looking faces have a greater chance of being elected, and CEOs who look dominant are more likely to run a profitable company. There is also a well-established “attractiveness halo”. People seen as good-looking not only get the most valentines but are also judged to be more outgoing, socially competent, powerful, intelligent and healthy.

In 1966, psychologists at the University of Michigan asked 84 undergraduates who had never met before to rate each other on five personality traits, based entirely on appearance, as they sat for 15 minutes in silence. For three traits—extroversion, conscientiousness and openness—the observers’ rapid judgements matched real personality scores significantly more often than chance. More recently, researchers have re-examined the link between appearance and personality, notably Anthony Little of the University of Stirling and David Perrett of the University of St Andrews, both in the UK. They pointed out that the Michigan studies were not tightly controlled for confounding factors. But when Little and Perrett re-ran the experiment using mugshots rather than live subjects, they also found a link between facial appearance and personality—though only for extroversion and conscientiousness. Little and Perrett claimed that they only found a correlation at the extremes of personality.

Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario, Canada studied 90 ice-hockey players. They found that a wider face in which the cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance was unusually large relative to the distance between brow and upper lip was linked in a statistically significant way with the number of penalty minutes a player was given for violent acts including slashing, elbowing, checking from behind and fighting. The kernel of truth idea isn’t the only explanation on offer for our readiness to make facial judgements. Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, says that in many cases snap judgements are not accurate. The snap judgement, she says, is often an “overgeneralisation” of a more fundamental response. A classic example of overgeneralisation can be seen in predators’ response to eye spots, the conspicuous circular markings seen on some moths, butterflies and fish. These act as a deterrent to predators because they mimic the eyes of other creatures that the potential predators might see as a threat.

Another researcher who leans towards overgeneralisation is Alexander Todorov. With Princeton colleague Nikolaas Oosterhof, he recently put forward a theory which he says explains our snap judgements of faces in terms of how threatening they appear. Todorov and Oosterhof asked people for their gut reactions to pictures of emotionally neutral faces, sifted through all the responses, and boiled them down to two underlying factors: how trustworthy the face looks, and how dominant. Todorov and Oosterhof conclude that personality judgements based on people’s faces are an overgeneralisation of our evolved ability to infer emotions from facial expressions, and hence a person’s intention to cause us harm and their ability to carry it out. Todorov, however, stresses that overgeneralisation does not rule out the idea that there is sometimes a kernel of truth in these assessments of personality.

So if there is a kernel of truth, where does it come from? Perrett has a hunch that the link arises when our prejudices about faces turn into self-fulfilling prophecies—an idea that was investigated by other researchers back in 1977. Our expectations can lead us to influence people to behave in ways that confirm those expectations: consistently treat someone as untrustworthy and they end up behaving that way. This effect sometimes works the other way round, however, especially for those who look cute. The Nobel prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz once suggested that baby-faced features evoke a nurturing response. Support for this has come from work by Zebrowitz, who has found that baby-faced boys and men stimulate an emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, in a similar way. But there’s a twist. Babyfaced men are, on average, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts. They are also more likely to be criminals; think Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-faced boys to be quarrelsome and hostile, and more likely to be academic highfliers. She calls this the “self-defeating prophecy effect”: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up overcompensating.

There is another theory that recalls the old parental warning not to pull faces because they might freeze that way. According to this theory, our personality moulds the way our faces look. It is supported by a study two decades ago which found that angry old people tend to look cross even when asked to strike a neutral expression. A lifetime of scowling, grumpiness and grimaces seemed to have left its mark.

Questions 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say that the writer thinks about this

1/ Robert Fitzroy’s first impression of Darwin was accurate.

2/ The precise rules of “physiognomy” have remained unchanged since the 18th century.

3/ The first impression of a person can be modified later with little effort.

4/ People who appear capable are more likely to be chosen to a position of power.

5/ It is unfair for good-looking people to be better treated in society

Questions 6-10

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

6./ What’s true about Anthony Little and David Perrett’s experiment?

A It is based on the belief that none of the conclusions in the Michigan experiment is accurate.

B It supports parts of the conclusions in the Michigan experiment.

C It replicates the study conditions in the Michigan experiment.

D It has a greater range of faces than in the Michigan experiment.

7./ What can be concluded from Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick’s experiment?

A A wide-faced man may be more aggressive.

B Aggressive men have a wide range of facial features.

C There is no relation between facial features and an aggressive character.

D It’s necessary for people to be aggressive in competitive games.

8./ What’s exemplified by referring to butterfly marks?

A Threats to safety are easy to notice.

B Instinct does not necessarily lead to accurate judgment.

C People should learn to distinguish between accountable and unaccountable judgments.

D Different species have various ways to notice danger.

9./ What is the aim of Alexander Todorov’s study?

A to determine the correlation between facial features and social development

B to undermine the belief that appearance is important

C to learn the influence of facial features on judgments of a person’s personality

D to study the role of judgments in a person’s relationship

10./ Which of the following is the conclusion of Alexander Todorov’s study?

A People should draw accurate judgments from overgeneralization.

B Using appearance to determine a person’s character is undependable.

C Overgeneralization can be misleading as a way to determine a person’s character.

D The judgment of a person’s character based on appearance may be accurate.

Questions 11-14

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.

11/ Perret believed people behaving dishonestly

12/ The writer supports the view that people with babyish features

13/ According to Zebrowitz, baby-faced people who behave dominantly

14/ The writer believes facial features

A judge other people by overgeneralization,

B may influence the behaviour of other people,

C tend to commit criminal acts.

D may be influenced by the low expectations of other people.

E may show the effect of long-term behaviours.

F may be trying to repel the expectations of other people.

READING TESTS

TEST 13: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 Radio Automation

Today they are everywhere. Production lines controlled by computers and operated by robots. There’s no chatter of assembly workers, just the whirr and click of machines. In the mid-1940s, the workerless factory was still the stuff of science fiction. There were no computers to speak of and electronics was primitive. Yet hidden away in the English countryside was a highly automated production line called ECME, which could turn out 1500 radio receivers a day with almost no help from human hands.

John Sargrove, the visionary engineer who developed the technology, was way ahead of his time. For more than a decade, Sargrove had been trying to figure out how to make cheaper radios. Automating the manufacturing process would help. But radios didn’t lend themselves to such methods: there were too many parts to fit together and too many wires to solder. Even a simple receiver might have 30 separate components and 80 hand-soldered connections. At every stage, things had to be tested and inspected. Making radios required highly skilled labour—and lots of it.

In 1944, Sargrove came up with the answer. His solution was to dispense with most of the fiddly bits by inventing a primitive chip—a slab of Bakelite with all the receiver’s electrical components and connections embedded in it. This was something that could be made by machines, and he designed those too. At the end of the war, Sargrove built an automatic production line, which he called ECME (electronic circuit-making equipment), in a small factory in Effingham, Surrey.

An operator sat at one end of each ECME line, feeding in die plates. She didn’t need much skill, only quick hands. From now on, everything was controlled by electronic switches and relays. First stop was the sandblaster, which roughened the surface of the plastic BO that molten metal would stick to it The plates were then cleaned to remove any traces of grit The machine automatically checked that the surface was rough enough before sending the plate to the spraying section. There, eight nozzles rotated into position and sprayed molten zinc over both sides of the plate. Again, the nozzles only began to spray when a plate was in place. The plate whizzed on. The next stop was the milling machine, which ground away the surface layer of metal to leave the circuit and other components in the grooves and recesses. Now the plate was a composite of metal and plastic. It sped on to be lacquered and have its circuits tested. By the time it emerged from the end of the line, robot hands had fitted it with sockets to attach components such as valves and loudspeakers. When ECME was working flat out; the whole process took 20 seconds.

ECME was astonishingly advanced. Electronic eyes, photocells that generated a small current when a panel arrived, triggered each step in the operation, BO avoiding excessive wear and tear on the machinery. The plates were automatically tested at each stage as they moved along the conveyor. And if more than two plates in succession were duds, the machines were automatically adjusted—or if necessary halted In a conventional factory, I workers would test faulty circuits and repair them. But Sargrove’s assembly line produced circuits so cheaply they just threw away the faulty ones. Sargrove’s circuit board was even more astonishing for the time. It predated the more familiar printed circuit, with wiring printed on aboard, yet was more sophisticated. Its built-in components made it more like a modem chip.

When Sargrove unveiled his invention at a meeting of the British Institution of Radio Engineers in February 1947, the assembled engineers were impressed. So was the man from The Times. ECME, he reported the following day, “produces almost without human labour, a complete radio receiving set. This new method of production can be equally well applied to television and other forms of electronic apparatus. F. The receivers had many advantages over their predecessors, wit components they were more robust. Robots didn’t make the sorts of mistakes human assembly workers sometimes did. “Wiring mistakes just cannot happen,” wrote Sargrove. No w ừ es also meant the radios were lighter and cheaper to ship abroad. And with no soldered wires to come unstuck, the radios were more reliable. Sargrove pointed out that the drcuit boards didn’t have to be flat. They could be curved, opening up the prospect of building the electronics into the cabinet of Bakelite radios.

Sargrove was all for introducing this type of automation to other products. It could be used to make more complex electronic equipment than radios, he argued. And even if only part of a manufacturing process were automated, the savings would be substantial. But while his invention was brilliant, his timing was bad. ECME was too advanced for its own good. It was only competitive on huge production runs because each new job meant retooling the machines. But disruption was frequent. Sophisticated as it was, ECME still depended on old- fashioned electromechanical relays and valves—which failed with monotonous regularity. The state of Britain’s economy added to Sargrove’s troubles. Production was dogged by power cuts and post-war shortages of materials. Sargrove’s financial backers began to get cold feet.

There was another problem Sargrove hadn’t foreseen. One of ECME’s biggest advantages—the savings on the cost of labour—also accelerated its downfall. Sargrove’s factory had two ECME production lines to produce the two c ữ cuits needed for each radio. Between them these did what a thousand assembly workers would otherwise have done. Human hands were needed only to feed the raw material in at one end and plug the valves into then sockets and fit the loudspeakers at the other. After that, the only job left was to fit the pair of Bakelite panels into a radio cabinet and check that it worked.

Sargrove saw automation as the way to solve post-war labour shortages. With somewhat Utopian idealism, he imagined his new technology would free people from boring, repetitive jobs on the production line and allow them to do more interesting work. “Don’t get the idea that we are out to rob people of then jobs,” he told the Daily Mnror. “Our task is to liberate men and women from being slaves of machines.”

The workers saw things differently. They viewed automation in the same light as the everlasting light bulb or the suit that never wears out—as a threat to people’s livelihoods. If automation spread, they wouldn’t be released to do more exciting jobs. They’d be released to join the dole queue. Financial backing for ECME fizzled out. The money dried up. And Britain lost its lead in a technology that would transform industry just a few years later.

Questions 8-11

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage. using NO more than two words from the

Reading Passage for each answer. Writs your answers inboxes 8-11 on your answer sheet

Summary

Sargrove had been dedicated to create a 8 ………………….. radio by automation of manufacture. The old version of radio had a large number of independent 9………………….. . After this innovation made, wireless-

style radios became 10 ………………….. and inexpensive to export oversea. As the Saigrove saw it, the real benefit of ECME’s radio was that it reduced 11 ………………….. of manual work; which can be easily copied to other industries of manufacturing electronic devices.

Questions 12-13

Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

Write your answers inboxes 12-13 on your answer sheet

12./ What were workers attitude towards ECME Model initialy

A anxious

B welcoming

C boring

D inspiring

13./ What is the main idea of this passage?

A approach to reduce the price of radio

B a new generation of fully popular products and successful business

C in application of die automation in the early stage

D ECME technology can be applied in many product fields

PASSAGE 2 How do we find our way?

Most modern navigation, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), relies primarily on positions determined electronically by receivers collecting information from satellites. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated, we can become lost. Then we have to rely on the ancient human skill of navigating in three dimensional space. Luckily, our biological finder has an important advantage over GPS: we can ask questions of people on the sidewalk, or follow a street that looks familiar, or rely on a navigational rubric. The human positioning system is flexible and capable of learning. Anyone who knows the way from point A to point B-and from A to C-can probably figure out how to get from B to C, too.

But how does this complex cognitive system really work? Researchers are looking at several strategies people use to orient themselves in space: guidance, path integration and route following. We may use all three or combinations thereof, and as experts learn more about these navigational skills, they are making the case that our abilities may underlie our powers of memory and logical thinking. For example, you come to New York City for the first time and you get off the train at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. You have a few hours to see popular spots you have been told about: Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You meander in and out of shops along the way. Suddenly, it is time to get back to the station. But how?

If you ask passersby for help, most likely you will receive information in many different forms. A person who orients herself by a prominent landmark would gesture southward: “Look down there. See the tall, broad MetLife Building? Head for that- the station is right below it.” Neurologists call this navigational approach “guidance”, meaning that a landmark visible from a distance serves as the marker for one’s destination.

Another city dweller might say: “What places do you remember passing? … Okay. Go toward the end of Central Park, then walk down to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A few more blocks, and Grand Central will be off to your left.” In this case, you are pointed toward the most recent place you recall, and you aim for it. Once there you head for the next notable place and so on, retracing your path. Your brain is adding together the individual legs of your trek into a cumulative progress report. Researchers call this strategy “path integration.” Many animals rely primarily on path integration to get around, including insects, spiders, crabs and rodents. The desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis employ this method to return from foraging as far as 100 yards away. They note the general direction they came from and retrace their steps, using the polarization of sunlight to orient themselves even under overcast skies. On their way back they are faithful to this inner homing vector. Even when a scientist picks up an ant and puts it in a totally different spot, the insect stubbornly proceeds in the originally determined direction until it has gone “back” all of the distance it wandered from its nest. Only then does the ant realize it has not succeeded, and it begins to walk in successively larger loops to find its way home.

Whether it is trying to get back to the anthill or the train station, any animal using path integration must keep track of its own movements so it knows, while returning, which segments it has already completed. As you move, your brain gathers data from your environment-sights, sounds, smells, lighting, muscle contractions, a sense of time passing-to determine which way your body has gone. The church spire, the sizzling sausages on that vendor’s grill, the open courtyard, and the train station-all represent snapshots of memorable junctures during your journey.

In addition to guidance and path integration, we use a third method for finding our way. An office worker you approach for help on a Manhattan street comer might say: “Walk straight down Fifth, turn left on 47th, turn right on Park, go through the walkway under the Helmsley Building, then cross the street to the MetLife Building into Grand Central.” This strategy, called route following, uses landmarks such as buildings and street names, plus directions straight, turn, go through—for reaching intermediate points. Route following is more precise than guidance or path integration, but if you forget the details and take a wrong turn, the only way to recover is to backtrack until you reach a familiar spot, because you do not know the general direction or have a reference landmark for your goal. The route following navigation strategy truly challenges the brain. We have to keep all the landmarks and intermediate directions in our head. It is the most detailed and therefore most reliable method, but it can be undone by routine memory lapses. With path integration, our cognitive memory is less burdened; it has to deal with only a few general instructions and the homing vector. Path integration works because it relies most fundamentally on our knowledge of our body’s general direction of movement, and we always have access to these inputs. Nevertheless, people often choose to give route-following directions, in part because saying “Go straight that way!” just does not work in our complex, man made surroundings.

Road Map or Metaphor? On your next visit to Manhattan you will rely on your memory to get present geographic information for convenient visual obviously seductive: maps around. Most likely you will use guidance, path integration and route following in various combinations. But how exactly do these constructs deliver concrete directions? Do we humans have, as an image of the real world, a kind of road map in our heads? Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists do call the portion of our memory that controls navigation a “cognitive map”. The map metaphor is are the easiest way to inspection. Yet the notion of a literal map in our heads may be misleading; a growing body of research implies that the cognitive map is mostly a metaphor. It may be more like a hierarchical structure of relationships.

Questions 1-5

Use the information in the passage to match the category of each navigation method (listed A-C) with correct statement.

Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

A. guidance method

B. path integration method

C. route following method

1/ Split the route up into several smaller parts.

2/ When mistakes are made, a person needs to go back.

3/ Find a building that can be seen from far away.

4/ Recall all the details along the way.

5/ Memorize the buildings that you have passed by.

Questions 6-8

6./ According to the passage, how does the Cataglyphis ant respond if it is taken to a different location?

A changes its orientation sensors to adapt

B releases biological scent for help from others

C continues to move according to the original orientation

D gets completely lost once disturbed

7./ What did the author say about the route following method?

A dependent on directions to move on

B dependent on memory and reasoning

C dependent on man-made settings

D dependent on the homing vector

8./ Which of the following is true about the “cognitive map” in this passage?

A There is no obvious difference between it and a real map.

B It exists in our heads and is always correct.

C It only exists in some cultures.

D It is managed by a portion of our memory.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE

FALSE

NOT GIVEN

if the statement agrees with the information

if the statement contradicts the information

if there is no information on this

9/ Biological navigation is flexible.

10/ Insects have many ways to navigate that are in common with many other animals.

11/ When someone follows a route, he or she collects comprehensive perceptual information in the mind along the way.

12/ The path integration method has a higher requirement of memory compared with the route following method.

13/ When people find their way, they have an exact map in their mind.

PASSAGE 3 Art in Iron and Steel

Works of engineering and technology are sometimes viewed as the antitheses of art and humanity. Think of the connotations of assembly lines, robots, and computers. Any positive values there might be in such creations of the mind and human industry can be overwhelmed by the associated negative images of repetitive, stressful, and threatened jobs. Such images fuel the arguments of critics of technology even as they may drive powerful cars and use the Internet to protest what they see as the artless and dehumanizing aspects of living in an industrialized and digitized society. At the same time, landmark megastructures such as the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges are almost universally hailed as majestic human achievements as well as great engineering monuments that have come to embody the spirits of their respective cities. The relationship between art and engineering has seldom been easy or consistent.

The human worker may have appeared to be but a cog in the wheel of industry, yet photographers could reveal the beauty of line and composition in a worker doing something as common as using a wrench to turn a bolt. When Henry Ford’s enormous River Rouge plant opened in 1927 to produce the Model A, the painter/photographer Charles Sheeler was chosen to photograph it. The world’s largest car factory captured the imagination of Sheeler, who described it as the most thrilling subject he ever had to work with. The artist also composed oil paintings of the plant, giving them titles such as American Landscape and Classic Landscape.

Long before Sheeler, other artists, too, had seen the beauty and humanity in works of engineering and technology. This is perhaps no more evident than in Coalbrookdale, England, where iron, which was so important to the industrial revolution, was worked for centuries. Here, in the late eighteenth century, Abraham Darby III cast on the banks of the Severn River the large ribs that formed the world’s first iron bridge, a dramatic departure from the classic stone and timber bridges that dotted the countryside and were captured in numerous serene landscape paintings. The metal structure, simply but appropriately called Iron Bridge, still spans the river and still beckons engineers, artists, and tourists to gaze upon and walk across it, as if on a pilgrimage to a revered place.

At Coalbrookdale, the reflection of the ironwork in the water completes the semicircular structure to form a wide-open eye into the future that is now the past. One artist’s bucolic depiction shows pedestrians and horsemen on the bridge, as if on a woodland trail. On one shore, a pair of well-dressed onlookers interrupts their stroll along the riverbank, perhaps to admire the bridge. On the other side of the gently flowing river, a lone man leads two mules beneath an arch that lets the towpath pass through the bridge’s abutment. A single boatman paddles across the river in a tiny tub boat. He is in no rush because there is no towline to carry from one side of the bridge to the other. This is how Michael Rooker was Iron Bridge in his 1792 painting. A colored engraving of the scene hangs in the nearby Coalbrookdale museum, along with countless other contemporary renderings of the bridge in its full glory and in its context, showing the iron structure not as a blight on the landscape but at the center of it. The surrounding area at the same time radiates out from the bridge and pales behind it.

In the nineteenth century, the railroads captured the imagination of artists, and the steam engine in the distance of a landscape became as much a part of it as the herd of cows in the foreground. The Impressionist Claude Monet painted man-made structures like railway stations and cathedrals as well as water lilies. Portrait painters such as Christian Schussele found subjects in engineers and inventors – and their inventions – as well as in the American founding fathers. By the twentieth century, engineering, technology, and industry were very well established as subjects for artists.

American-born Joseph Pennell illustrated many European travel articles and books. Pennell, who early in his career made drawings of buildings under construction and shrouded in scaffolding, returned to America late in life and recorded industrial activities during World War I. He is perhaps best known among engineers for his depiction of the Panama Canal as it neared completion and his etchings of the partially completed Hell Gate and Delaware River bridges.

Pennell has often been quoted as saying, “Great engineering is great art,” a sentiment that he expressed repeatedly. He wrote of his contemporaries, “I understand nothing of engineering, but I know that engineers are the greatest architects and the most pictorial builders since the Greeks.” Where some observers saw only utility, Pennell saw also beauty, if not in form then at least in scale. He felt he was not only rendering a concrete subject but also conveying through his drawings the impression that it made on him. Pennell called the sensation that he felt before a great construction project ‘The Wonder of Work”. He saw engineering as a process. That process is memorialized in every completed dam, skyscraper, bridge, or other great achievement of engineering.

If Pennell experienced the wonder of work in the aggregate, Lewis Hine focused on the individuals who engaged in the work. Hine was trained as a sociologist but became best known as a photographer who exposed the exploitation of children. His early work documented immigrants passing through Ellis Island, along with the conditions in the New York tenements where they lived and the sweatshops where they worked. Upon returning to New York, he was given the opportunity to record the construction of the Empire State Building, which resulted in the striking photographs that have become such familiar images of daring and insouciance. He put his own life at risk to capture workers suspended on cables hundreds of feet in the air and sitting on a high girder eating lunch. To engineers today, one of the most striking features of these photos, published in 1932 in Men at Work, is the absence of safety lines and hard hats. However, perhaps more than anything, the photos evoke Pennell’s “The Wonder of Work” and inspire admiration for the bravery and skill that bring a great engineering project to completion.

Questions 1-5 The Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

1/ Art connected with architecture for the first time.

2/ small artistic object and constructions built are put together

3 /the working condition were recorded by the artist as an exciting subject.

4/ mention of one engineers’ artistic work on an unfinished engineering project

5/ Two examples of famous bridges which became the iconic symbols of those cities

Questions 6-10

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

List of people

A Charles Sheeler

B Michael Rooker

C Claude Monet

D Christian Schussele

E Joseph Pennell

F Lewis Hine

6/ who made a comment that concrete constructions have a beauty just as artistic processes created by engineers the architects

7/ who made a romantic depiction of an old bridge in one painting

8/ who produced art pieces demonstrating the courage of workers in the site

9/ who produced portraits involving subjects in engineers and inventions and historical human heroes.

10/ who produced a painting of factories and named them ambitiously

Questions 11-14

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage

Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.

Iron bridge Coalbrookdale, England

In the late eighteenth century, as artists began to capture the artistic attractiveness incorporated into architecture via engineering and technology were captured in numerous serene landscape paintings. One good example, the engineer called 11 had designed the first iron bridge in the world and changed to using irons yet earlier bridges in the countryside were constructed using materials such as 12 and wood. This first Iron bridge which across the 13 was much significant in the industrial revolution period and it functioned for centuries. Numerous spectacular paintings and sculpture of Iron Bridge are collected and exhibited locally in 14 , showing the iron structure as a theme on the landscape.

READING TESTS

TEST 12: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 26, 2025

PASSAGE 1 Renewable Energy

An insight into the progress in renewable energy research

The race is on for the ultimate goal of renewable energy: electricity production at prices that are competitive with coal-fired power stations, but without coal’s pollution. Some new technologies are aiming to be the first to push coal from its position as Australia’s chief source of electricity.

At the moment the front-runner in renewable energy is wind technology. According to Peter Bergin of Australian Hydro, one of Australia’s leading wind energy companies, there have been no dramatic changes in windmill design for many years, but the cumulative effects of numerous small improvements have had a major impact on cost. ‘We’re reaping the benefits of 30 years of research in Europe, without have to make the same mistakes that they did,’ Mr Bergin says.

Electricity can be produced from coal at around 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, but only if the environmental costs are ignored. ‘Australia has the second cheapest electricity in the world, and this makes it difficult for renewable to compete,’ says Richard Hunter of the Australian Ecogeneration Association (AEA). Nevertheless, the AEA reports: ‘The production cost of a kilowatt-hour of wind power is one-fifth of what it was 20 years ago,’ or around 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Australian Hydro has dozens of wind monitoring stations across Australia as part of its aim to become Australia’s pre-eminent renewable energy company. Despite all these developments, wind power remains one of the few forms of alternative energy where Australia is nowhere near the global cutting edge, mostly just replicating European designs.

While wind may currently lead the way, some consider a number of technologies under development have more potential. In several cases, Australia is at the forefront of global research in the area. Some of them are very site- specific, ensuring that they may never become dominant market players. On the other hand, these newer developments are capable of providing more reliable power, avoiding the major criticism of windmills – the need for back-up on a calm day.

One such development uses hot, dry rocks. Deep beneath South Australia, radiation from elements contained in granite heats the rocks. Layers of insulating sedimentation raise the temperatures in some location to 250° centigrade. An Australian firm, Geoenergy, is proposing to pump water 3.5 kilometres into the earth, where it will travel through tiny fissures in the granite, heating up as it goes until it escapes as steam through another

No greenhouse gases are produced, but the system needs some additional features if it is to be environmentally friendly. Dr Prue Chopra, a geophysicist at the Australian National University and one of the founders of Geoenergy, note that the steam will bring with it radon gas, along through a heat exchanger and then sent back underground for another cycle. Technically speaking, hot dry rocks are not a renewable source of energy. However, the Australian source is so large it could supply the entire country’s needs for thousands of years at current rates of consumption.

Two other proposals for very different ways to harness sun and wind energy have surfaced recently. Progress continues with Australian company EnviroPower’s plans for Australia’s first solar chimney near Mildura, in Victoria. Under this scheme, a tall tower will draw hot air from a greenhouse built to cover the surrounding 5 km2. As the air rises, it will drive a turbine* to produce electricity. The solar tower combines three very old technologies – the chimney, the turbine and the greenhouse – to produce something quite new. It is this reliance on proven engineering principles that led Enviropower’s CEO, Richard Davies, to state: There is no doubt this technology will work, none at all.’

This year, Enviropower recognized that the quality of sunlight in the Mildura district will require a substantially larger collecting area than was previously thought. However, spokesperson kay Firth says that a new location closer to Mildura will enable Enviropower to balance the increased costs with extra revenue. Besides saving in transmission costs, the new site ‘will mean increased revenue from tourism and use of power for telecommunications. We’ll also be able to use the outer 500 metres for agribusiness.’ Wind speeds closer to the tower will be too high for farming.

Another Australian company, Wavetech, is achieving success with ways of harvesting the energy in waves. Wavetech’s invention uses a curved surface to push waves into a chamber, where the flowing water column pushes air back and forth through a turbine. Wavetech was created when Dr Tim Devine offered the idea to the world leader in wave generator manufacturers, who rather surprisingly rejected it. Dr Devine responded by establishing Wavetech and making a number of other improvements to generator design. Wavetech claims that, at appropriate sites, ‘the cost of electricity produced with our technology should be below 4 cents per kilowatt- hour.

The diversity of forms of greenhouse – friendly energy under development in Australia is remarkable. However, support on a national level is disappointing. According to Richard Hunter of the AEA, ‘Australia has huge potential for wind, sun and wave technology. We should really be at the forefront, but the reality is we are a long way behind.’

Questions 1-7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1/ In Australia, alternative energies are less expensive than conventional electricity.

2/ Geoenergy needs to adapt its system to make it less harmful to the environment.

3/ Dr Prue Chopra has studied the effects of radon gas on the environment.

4/ Hot, dry rocks could provide enough power for the whole of Australia.

5/ The new Enviropower facility will keep tourists away.

6/ Wavetech was established when its founders were turned down by another company.

7/ According to AEA, Australia is a world leader in developing renewable energy.

Questions 8-13

Look at the following statements (Questions 8-13) and the list of companies below.

Match each statement with the correct company, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

8/ During the process, harmful substances are prevented from escaping.

9/ Water is used to force air through a special device.

10/ Techniques used by other countries are being copied.

11/ The system can provide services other than energy production

12/ It is planned to force water deep under the ground.

13/ Original estimates for part of the project have been revised.

List of Companies

A Australian Hydro

B Geoenergy

C Enviropower

D Wavetech

PASSAGE 2: The Impact of Environment to Children

What determines how a child develops? In reality, it would be impossible to account for each and every influence that ultimately determines who a child becomes. What we can look at are some of the most apparent influences such as genetics, parenting, experiences, friends, family relationships and school to help us understand the influences that help contribute to a child’s growth.

Think of these influences as building blocks. While roost people tend to have the same basic building blocks, these components can be put together in an infinite number of ways. Consider your own overall personality. How much of who you are today was shaped by your genetic inheritance, and how much is a result of your lifetime of experiences? This question has puzzled philosophers, psychologists and educators for hundreds of years and is frequently referred to as the nature versus nurture debate. Generally, the given rate of influence on children is 40 % to 50%. It may refer to all of siblings of a family. Are we the result of nature (our genetic background) or nurture (our environment)? Today, most researchers agree that child development involves a complex interaction of both nature and nurture, while some aspects of development may be strongly influenced by biology, environmental influences may also play a role. For example, the timing of when the onset of puberty occurs is largely the results of heredity, but environmental factors such as nutrition can also have an effect.

The From the earliest moments of life, the interaction of heredity and the environment works to shape who children are and who they will become. While the genetic instructions a child inherits from his parents may set out a road map for development, the environment can impact how these directions are expressed, shaped or event silenced. The complex interaction of nature and nurture does not just occur at certain moments or at certain periods of time; it is persistent and lifelong.

The shared environment (also called common environment) refers to environmental influences that have the effect of making siblings more similar to one another. Shared environmental influences can include shared family experiences, shared peer groups, and sharing the same school and community. In general, there has not been strong evidence for shared environmental effects on many behaviors, particularly those measured in adults. Possible reasons for this are discussed. Shared environmental effects are evident in children and adolescents, but these effects generally decrease across the life span. New developments in behavior genetic methods have made it possible to specify shared environments of importance and to tease apart familial and nonfamilial sources of shared environmental influence. It may also refer to all of siblings of a family, but the rate of influence is less than 10 per cent.

The importance of non-shared environment lay hidden within quantitative genetic studies since they began nearly a century ago. Quantitative genetic methods, such as twin and adoption methods, were designed to tease apart nature and nurture in order to explain family resemblance. For nearly all complex phenotypes, it has emerged that the answer to the question of the origins of family resemblance is nature-things run in families primarily for genetic reasons. However, the best available evidence for the importance of environmental influence comes from this same quantitative genetic research because genetic influence never explains all of the variances for complex phenotypes, and the remaining variance must be ascribed to environmental influences. Non-shared environment, it may refer to the part of siblings of a family, the rate of influence to children is 40 % to 50%.

Yet it took many decades for the full meaning of these findings to emerge. If genetics explains why siblings growing up in the same family are similar, but the environment is important, then it must be the case that the salient environmental effects do not make siblings similar. That is, they are not shared by children growing up in the same family-they must be ‘non-shared’. This implication about non-shared environmental import lay fallow in the field of quantitative genetics because the field’s attention was then firmly on the nature-nurture debate. ‘Nurture’ in the nature-nurture debate was implicitly taken to mean shared environment because, from Freud onwards, theories of socialization had assumed that children’s environments are doled out on a family-by-family basis. In contrast, the point of the non-shared environment is that environments are doled out on a child-by-child basis. Note that the phrase ‘non-shared environment’ is shorthand for a component of phenotypic variance-it refers to ‘effects’ rather than ‘events’, as discussed later. Research in recent years suggested that the impact from parents will be easy to be interrupted by the influence from the children of the same age. That also showed that variations of knowledge that children get from other culture are increasing. A number of interests between, whatever, fathers and mothers or parents and their children are conflicting.

Because siblings living in the same home share some but not all of the potential genetic and environmental factors that influence their behaviors, teasing apart the potential influences of genetic and non-genetic factors that differentiate siblings is very difficult. Turkheimer and Waldron (2000) have noted that non-shared environmental influences——which include all of the random measurement error——may not be systematic, but instead may operate idiosyncratically and in ways that cannot be ascertained. Thus, the question is whether or not quasi-experimental behavioral genetic designs can be used to actually identify systematic non-shared environmental mechanisms cross-sectionally and longitudinally. This is the impetus for the current study.

Questions 1-5 Complete the table now. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Questions 6-8 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage. Using NO MORE THAN

THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

Research in recent years illuminated that the impact from parents will frequently be 6…………………. by the peer’s pressure. It was also indicated that 7………………… of knowledge that children learned from other culture is increasing. The study has found quantities of competing 8………………… between parents and children or even between parents themselves.

Questions 9-12 Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage

In boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

9………………… The more children there are in a family, the more impacts of environment it is.

10………………… Methods based on twin studies still meet unexpected differences that cannot be ascribed to be

a purely genetic explanation.

11………………… Children prefer to speak the language from the children of the same age to the language

spoken by their parents.

12………………… The Study of non-shared environment influence can be a generally agreed idea among researchers in the field.

Question 13 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

Write your answers in box 13 on your answer sheet

According to this passage, which comment is TURE about the current Study of non-shared environment influence to children?

A a little biased in nature

B not sufficiently proved

C very systematic

D can be workable

PASSAGE 3: What Are Dreams ?

Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive dreams that would heal them. Modern dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Feud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of unconscious desires often stemming from childhood. He believed that exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure mental illness. The Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated until the 1970s when new research into the chemistry of the brain showed that emotional problems could have biological or chemical roots, as well as environmental ones. In other words, we weren’t sick just because of something our mothers did (or didn’t do), but because of some imbalance that might be cured with medication.

After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). People awakened in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM. Using the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers could see that brain activity during REM resembled that of the waking brain. That old them that a lot more was going on at night than anyone had suspected. But what, exactly?

Scientists still don’t know for sure, although they have lots of theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard’s Allan Hobson, who believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called the “activation-synthesis hypothesis’” which describes how dreams are formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams. That put a crimp in dream research; if dreams were meaningless nocturnal firings, what was the point of studying them?

Adult humans spend about a quarter of their sleep time in REM, much of it dreaming. During that time, the body is essentially paralyzed but the brain is buzzing. Scientists using PET and fMRI technology to watch the dreaming brain have found that one of the most active areas during REM is the limbic system, which controls our emotions. Much less active is the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with logical thinking. That could explain why dreams in REM sleep often lack a coherent storyline (some researchers have also found that people dream in non-REM sleep as well, although those dreams generally are less vivid.) Another active part of the brain in REM sleep is the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects discrepancies. Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, thinks that could be why people often figure out thorny problems in their dreams. “As if the brain surveys the internal milieu and tries to figure out what it should be doing, and whether our actions conflict with who we are,” he says.

These may seem like vital mental functions, but no one has yet been able to say that REM sleep or dreaming is essential to life or even sanity. MAO inhibitors, an older class of antidepressants, essentially block REM sleep without any detectable effects, although people do get a “REM rebound” – extra REM – if they stop the medication. That’s also true of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, which reduce dreaming by a third to a half. Even permanently losing the ability to dream doesn’t have to be disabling. Israeli researcher Peretz Lavie has been observing a patient named Yuval Chamtzani, who was injured by a fragment of shrapnel that penetrated his brain when he was 19. As a result, he gets no REM sleep and doesn’t remember any dreams. But Lavie says that Chamtzani, now 55, “is probably the most normal person I know and one of the most successful ones.” He’s a lawyer, a painter and the editor of a puzzle column in a popular Israeli newspaper.

The mystery of REM sleep is that even though it may not be essential, it is ubiquitous – at least in mammals and birds. But that doesn’t mean all mammals and birds dream (or if they do, they’re certainly not – talking about it). Some researchers think REM may have evolved for physiological reasons. “One thing that’s unique about mammals and birds is that they regulate body temperature”, says neuroscientist Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA’s Center for Sleep Research. “There’s no good evidence that any coldblooded animal has REM sleep.” REM sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off, Siegel says, and that could mean that the changing sleep cycles allow the brain to repair itself. “It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic physiological function and that dreams are a kind of epiphenomenon,” Siegel says – an extraneous byproduct; like foam on beer.

Whatever the function of dreams at night, they clearly can play a role in therapy during the day. The University of Maryland’s Clara Hill, who has studied the use of dreams in therapy, says that dreams are a ‘backdoor’, into a patient’s thinking. “Dreams reveal stuff about you that you didn’t know was there,” she says. The therapists she trains to work with patients’ dreams are, in essence, heirs to Freud, using dream imagery to uncover hidden emotions and feelings. Dreams provide clues to the nature of the more serious mental illness. Schizophrenics, for example, have poor-quality dreams, usually about objects rather than people. “If you’re going to understand human behavior,” says Rosalind Cartwright, a chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, “here’s a big piece of it. Dreaming is our own storytelling time – to help us know who we are, where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.” Cartwright has been studying depression in divorced men and women, and she is finding that “good dreamers,” people who have vivid dreams with strong storylines, are less likely to remain depressed. She thinks that dreaming helps diffuse strong emotions. “Dreaming is a mental-health activity,” she says.

Questions 1-5

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct number, A-G, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

1/ Reference of an artist’s dreams who has versatile talents

2/ The dream actually happens to many animals

3/ Dreams are related to benefit and happiness

4/ advanced scientific technology applied in the investigation of the REM stage.

5/ questioning concern raised about the usefulness of investigation on dreams

Questions 6-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

6/ What were dreams regarded as by ancient people?

A superstitious and unreliable

B communication with gods and chance to predict the future

C medical relief for children with an ill desire

D rules to follow as they fell asleep in a temple

7/ According to Paragraph D, which part of the brain controls reasoning?

A anterior cingulate cortex

B internal cortex

C limbic system

D prefrontal cortex

8/ What can we conclude when the author cited a reference for dreams in animals?

A Brain temperature rises when REM pattern happens.

B The reason why mammals are warm-blooded

C mammals are bound to appear with more frequent REM.

D REM makes people want to drink beer with more foam.

Questions 9-14

Look at the following people and the list of statements below.

Match each statement with the correct person, A-G.

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 9-14 on your answer sheet.

List of people

A Sigmund Freud

B Allan Hobson (Harvard)

C Robert McCarley

D Eric Nofzinger

E Jerry Siegel

F Clara Hill

G Rosalind Cartwright

9/ Dreams sometimes come along with REM as no more than a trivial attachment

10/ Exploring patients’ dreams would be beneficial for treatment as it reveals the unconscious thinking

11/ Dreams help people cope with the difficulties they meet in the daytime

12/ Decoding dreams would provide a reminder to human desire in the early days

13/ Dreams are a body function to control strong emotion

14 Dreams seem to be as randomly occurring and have limited research significance.

READING TESTS

TEST 11: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 9, 2025

1/ Grey Workers

Given the speed at which their workers are growing greyer, employers know surprisingly little about how productive they are. The general assumption is that the old are paid more in spite of, rather than because of, their extra productivity. That might partly explain why, when employers are under pressure to cut costs, they persuade the 55-year-olds to take early retirement. Earlier this year, Sun Life of Canada, an insurance company, announced that it was offering redundancy to all its British employees aged 50 or over “to bring in new blood”.

In Japan, says Mariko Fujiwara, an industrial anthropologist who runs a think-tank for Hakuhodo, Japan’s second-largest advertising agency, most companies are bringing down the retirement age from the traditional 57 to 50 or thereabouts – and in some cases, such as Nissan, to 45. More than perhaps anywhere else, pay in Japan is linked to seniority. Given that the percentage of workers who have spent more than 32 years with the same employer rose from 11% in 1980 to 42% by 1994, it is hardly surprising that seniority-based wage costs have become the most intractable item on corporate profit-and-loss accounts.

In Germany, Patrick Pohl, spokesman for Hoechst, expresses a widely held view: “The company is trying to lower the average age of the workforce. Perhaps the main reason for replacing older workers is that it makes it easier to ‘defrost’ the corporate culture. Older workers are less willing to try a new way of thinking. Younger workers are cheaper and more flexible.” Some German firms are hampered from getting rid of older workers as quickly as they would like. At SGL Carbon, a graphite producer, the average age of workers has been going up not down. The reason, says the company’s Ivo Lingnau, is not that SGL values older workers more. It is collective bargaining: the union agreement puts strict limits on the proportion of workers that may retire early.

Clearly, when older people do heavy physical work, their age may affect their productivity. But other skills may increase with age, including many that are crucial for good management, such as an ability to handle people diplomatically, to run a meeting or to spot a problem before it blows up. Peter Hicks, who co-ordinates OECD work on the policy implications of ageing, says that plenty of research suggests older people are paid more because they are worth more.

And the virtues of the young may be exaggerated. “The few companies that have kept on older workers find they have good judgment and their productivity is good,” says Mr Peterson. “Besides, their education standards are much better than those of today’s young high-school graduates.” Companies may say that older workers are not worth training, because they are reaching the end of their working lives: in fact, young people tend to switch jobs so frequently that offer the worst returns on training. “The median age for employer-driven training is the late 40s and early 50s,” says Mr Hicks. “It goes mainly to managers.”

Take away those seniority-based pay scales, and older workers may become a much more attractive employment proposition. But most companies (and many workers) are uncomfortable with the idea of reducing someone’s pay in later life – although workers on piece-fates often earn less over time. So retaining the services of older workers may mean employing them in new ways.

One innovation, described in Mr Walker’s report on combating age barriers, was devised by IBM Belgium. Faced with the need to cut staff costs, and have decided to concentrate cuts on 55-60-year-olds, IBM set up a separate company called SkillTeam, which re-employed any of the early retired who wanted to go on working up to the age of 60. An employee who joined SkillTeam at the age of 55 on a five-year contract would work for 58% of his time, over the full period, for 88% of his last IBM salary. The company offered services to IBM, thus allowing it to retain access to some of the intellectual capital it would otherwise have lost.

The best way to tempt the old to go on working may be to build on such “bridge” jobs: part-time or temporary employment that creates a more gradual transition from full-time work to retirement. Mr Quinn, who has studied the phenomenon, finds that, in the United States, nearly half of all men and women who had been in full-time jobs in middle age moved into such “bridge” jobs at the end of their working lives. In general, it is the best-paid and worst-paid who carry on working: “There are”, he says, “two very different types of bridge jog- holders – those who continue working because they have to and those who continue working because they want to, even though they could afford to retire.”

If the job market grows more flexible, the old may find more jobs that suit them. Often, they will be self-employed. Sometimes, they may start their own businesses: a study by David Storey of Warwick University found that, in Britain, 70% of businesses started by people over 55 survived, compared with an average of only 19%. To coax the old back into the job market, work will not only have to pay. It will need to be more fun than touring the country in an Airstream trailer, or seeing the grandchildren, or playing golf. Only then will there be many more Joe Clarks.

Questions 1 – 4: TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN

1/ Insurance company Sun Life of Canada made the decision that it would
hire more Canadian employees rather than British ones in order to get
fresh staffs.
2/ Unlike other places, employees in Japan get paid according to the
years they are employed
3/ Elder workers are laid off by some German companies which are
refreshing corporate culture
4/ according to Peter Hicks, companies pay older people more regardless
of the contribution of they make.

Questions 5- 6 : According to the passage, there are several
advantages to hire elder people, please choose TWO from below:

A their productivity is more superior than the young.
B paid less compared with younger ones.
C run fast when there is a meeting
D has a better inter-person relationship
E identify problems in an advanced time

Questions 7-8

According to Mr Peterson, Compared with the elder employee, young graduates have several weaknesses in the workplace, please
choose TWO of them below:

A they are not worth training.
B their productivity is lower than counterparts.
C they change work more often
D their academic criteria is someway behind elders’.
E they are normally high school graduates.

9/ According to paragraph F, the firms and workers still hold the opinion
that:
A Older workers are more likely to attract other staff
B people are not happy if pay gets lower in retiring age.
C Older people have more retaining motivation than young people
D young people often earn less for their piece-rates salary.

10/ SkillTeam that has been founded by IBM conducted which of the
following movement:
A Ask all the old worker to continue their job on former working
hours basis
B Carry on the action of cutting off the elder’s proportion of
employment
C Ask employees to work more hours in order to get extra pay
D Re-hire old employees and kept the salary a bit lower

11/ Which of the followings is correct according to the research of Mr
Quinn:
A About 50% of all employees in America switched into ‘bridge’
jobs.
B Only the worst-paid continue to work.
C More men than women fell into the category of ‘bridge’ work.
D Some old people keep working for their motive rather than an economic incentive.

12/ Which of the followings is correct according to David Storey:
A 70% business is successful if hire more older people.
B Average success of a self-employed business is getting lower.
C Self-employed elder people are more likely to survive.
D Older people’s working hours are more flexible.

13/ What is the main purpose of the author in writing this passage?
A there must be a successful retiring program for the old
B order people should be correctly valued in employment
C old people should offer more helping young employees grow.
D There are more jobs in the world that only employ older people

2/ Computer Provides More Questions Than Answers

The island of Antikythera lies 18 miles north of Crete, where the Aegean Sea meets the Mediterranean. Currents there can make shipping treacherous – and one ship bound for ancient Rome never made it. The ship that sank there was a giant cargo vessel measuring nearly 500 feet long. It came to rest about 200 feet below the surface, where it stayed for more than 2,000 years until divers looking for sponges discovered the wreck a little more than a century ago.

Inside the hull were a number of bronze and marble statues. From the look of things, the ship seemed to be carrying luxury items, probably made in various Greek islands and bound for wealthy patrons in the growing Roman Empire. The statues were retrieved, along with a lot of other unimportant stuff, and stored. Nine months later, an enterprising archaeologist cleared off a layer of organic material from one of the pieces of junk and found that it looked like a gearwheel. It had inscriptions in Greek characters and seemed to have something to do with astronomy.

That piece of “junk” went on to become the most celebrated find from the shipwreck; it is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Research has shown that the wheel was part of a device so sophisticated that its complexity would not be matched for a thousand years – it was also the world’s first known analogue computer. The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.

Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human destiny?

“We have gear trains from the 9th century in Baghdad used for simpler displays of the solar and lunar motions relative to one another – they use eight gears,” said François Charette, a historian of science in Germany who wrote an editorial accompanying a new study of the mechanism two weeks ago in the journal Nature. “In this case, we have more than 30 gears. To see it on a computer animation makes it mind- boggling. There is no doubt it was a technological masterpiece.”

The device was probably built between 100 and 140 BC, and the understanding of astronomy it displays seems to have been based on knowledge developed by the Babylonians around 300-700 BC, said Mike Edmunds, a professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University in Britain. He led a research team that reconstructed what the gear mechanism would have looked like by using advanced three-dimensional-imaging technology. The group also decoded a number of the inscriptions. The mechanism explores the relationship between lunar months – the time it takes for the moon to cycle through its phases, say, full moon to the full moon – and calendar years. The gears had to be cut precisely to reflect this complex relationship; 19 calendar years equal 235 lunar months.

By turning the gear mechanism, which included what Edmunds called a beautiful system of epicyclic gears that factored in the elliptical orbit of the moon, a person could check what the sky would have looked like on a date in the past, or how it would appear in the future. The mechanism was encased in a box with doors in front and back covered with inscriptions – a sort of instruction manual. Inside the front door were pointers indicating the date and the position of the sun, moon and zodiac, while opening the back door revealed the relationship between calendar years and lunar months, and a mechanism to predict eclipses.

“If they needed to know when eclipses would occur, and this related to the rising and setting of stars and related them to dates and religious experiences, the mechanism would directly help,” said Yanis Bitsakis, a physicist at the University of Athens who co-wrote the Nature paper. “It is a mechanical computer. You turn the handle and you have a date on the front.” Building it would have been expensive and required the interaction of astronomers, engineers, intellectuals and craftspeople. Charette said the device overturned conventional ideas that the ancient Greeks were primarily ivory tower thinkers who did not deign to muddy their hands with technical stuff. It is a reminder, he said, that while the study of history often focuses on written texts, they can tell us only a fraction of what went on at a particular time.

Imagine a future historian encountering philosophy texts written in our time – and an aircraft engine. The books would tell that researcher what a few scholars were thinking today, but the engine would give them a far better window into how technology influenced our everyday lives. Charette said it was unlikely that the device was used by practitioners of astrology, then still in its infancy. More likely, he said, it was bound for a mantelpiece in some rich Roman’s home. Given that astronomers of the time already knew how to calculate the positions of the sun and the moon and to predict eclipses without the device, it would have been the equivalent of a device built for a planetarium today – something to spur popular interest or at least claim bragging rights.

Why was the technology that went into the device lost? “The time this was built, the jackboot of Rome was coming through,” Edmunds said. “The Romans were good at town planning and sanitation but were not known for their interest in science.” The fact that the device was so complex, and that it was being shipped with a number of other luxury items, tells Edmunds that it is very unlikely to have been the only one over made. Its sophistication “is such that it can’t have been the only one,” Edmunds said. “There must have been a tradition of making them. We’re always hopeful a better one will surface.” Indeed, he said, he hopes that his study and the renewed interest in the Antikythera Mechanism will prompt second looks by both amateurs and professionals around the world. “The archaeological world may look in their cupboards and maybe say, ‘That isn’t a bit of rusty old metal in the cupboard.’”

Questions 14-18: Which paragraph A-J contains the following
information?

14 The content inside the wrecked ship
15 Ancient astronomers and craftsman might involve
16 The location of the Antikythera Mechanism
17 Details of how it was found
18 Appearance and structure of the mechanism

Questions 19 – 22 :
Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

An ancient huge sunk 19………………………….. was found accidentally by sponges searcher. The ship loaded with 20……………………….. such as bronze and sculptures. However, an archaeologist found a junk similar to a 21……………………….. which has Greek script on it. This inspiring and elaborated device was found to be the first 22………………………… in the world

Questions 23 – 26 :

A Yanis Bitsakis
B Mike Edmunds
C François Charette

23/ More complicated than the previous device
24/ Anticipate to find more Antikythera Mechanism in the future
25/ Antikythera Mechanism was found related to the moon
26/ Mechanism assisted ancient people to calculate the movement of
stars.

3/ Mystery in Easter Island!

One of the world’s most famous yet least visited archaeological sites, Easter Island is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. Located in the Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and some 2200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, it is considered to be the world’s most remote inhabited island. The island is, technically speaking, a single massive volcano rising over ten thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean floor. The island received its most well-known current name, Easter Island, from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen who became the first European to visit Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722.

In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl popularized the idea that the island had been originally settled by advanced societies of Indians from the coast of South America. Extensive archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have confirmed this), that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and that they arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating of reeds from a grave confirms this). At the time of their arrival, much of the island was forested, was teeming with land birds, and was perhaps the most productive breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant food sources, the human population grew and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture.

That culture’s most famous features are its enormous stone statues called moai, at least 288 of which once stood upon massive stone platforms called ahu. There are some 250 of these ahu platforms spaced approximately one-half mile apart and creating an almost unbroken line around the perimeter of the island. Another 600 moai statues, in various stages of completion, are scattered around the island, either in quarries or along ancient roads between the quarries and the coastal areas where the statues were most often erected. Nearly all the moai are carved from the tough stone of the Rano Raraku volcano. The average statue is 14 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 14 tons. Some moai were as large as 33 feet and weighed more than 80 tons. Depending upon the size of the statues, it has been estimated that between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag them across the countryside on sledges and rollers made from the island’s trees.

Scholars are unable to definitively explain the function and use of the moai statues. It is assumed that their carving and erection derived from an idea rooted in similar practices found elsewhere in Polynesia but which evolved in a unique way on Easter Island. Archaeological and iconographic analysis indicates that the statue cult was based on an ideology of male, lineage-based authority incorporating anthropomorphic symbolism. The statues were thus symbols of authority and power, both religious and political. But they were not only symbols. To the people who erected and used them, they were actual repositories of sacred spirit. Carved stone and wooden objects in ancient Polynesian religions, when properly fashioned and ritually prepared, were believed to be charged by a magical spiritual essence called mana. The ahu platforms of Easter Island were the sanctuaries of the people, and the moai statues were the ritually charged sacred objects of those sanctuaries.

Besides its more well-known name, Easter Island is also known as Te- Pito-O-Te-Henuab, meaning ‘The Navel of the World’, and as Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, meaning ‘Eyes Looking at Heaven’. These ancient name and a host of mythological details ignored by mainstream archaeologists point to the possibility that the remote island may once have been a geodetic marker and the site of an astronomical observatory of a long- forgotten civilization. In his book, Heaven’s Mirror, Graham Hancock suggests that Easter Island may once have been a significant scientific outpost of this antediluvian civilization and that its location had extreme importance in a planet-spanning, mathematically precise grid of sacred sites. Two other alternative scholars, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, have extensively studied the location and possible function of these geodetic markers. In their fascinating book, Uriel’s Machine, they suggest that one purpose of the geodetic markers was as part of a global network of sophisticated astronomical observatories dedicated to predicting and preparing for future commentary impacts and crystal displacement cataclysms.

In the latter years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century, various writers and scientists have advanced theories regarding the rapid decline of Easter Island’s magnificent civilization around the time of the first European contact. Principal among these theories, and now shown to be inaccurate, is that postulated by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Basically, these theories state that a few centuries after Easter Island’s initial colonization the resource needs of the growing population had begun to outpace the island’s capacity to renew itself ecologically. By the 1400s the forests had been entirely cut, the rich ground cover had eroded away, the springs had dried up, and the vast flocks of birds coming to roost on the island had disappeared. With no logs to build canoes for offshore fishing, with depleted bird and wildlife food sources, and with declining crop yields because of the erosion of good soil, the nutritional intake of the people plummeted. First famine, then cannibalism, set in. Because the island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats and priests who kept the complex society running, the resulting chaos triggered a social and cultural collapse. By 1700 the population dropped to between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number, and many of the statues were toppled during supposed “clan wars” of the 1600 and 1700s.

The faulty notions presented in these theories began with the racist assumptions of Thor Heyerdahl and have been perpetuated by writers, such as Jared Diamond, who do not have sufficient archaeological and historical understanding of the actual events which occurred on Easter Island. The real truth regarding the tremendous social devastation which occurred on Easter Island is that it was a direct consequence of the inhumane behavior of many of the first European visitors, particularly the slavers who raped and murdered the islanders, introduced smallpox and other diseases, and brutally removed the natives to mainland South America.

Questions 27-30:

Questions 31-36: TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN

31/ The first inhabitants of Easter Island are Polynesian, from the
Marquesas or Society islands.
32/ Construction of some moai statues on the island was not finished.
33/ The Moai can be found not only on Easter Island but also elsewhere
in Polynesia.
34/ Most archaeologists recognised the religious and astronomical
functions for an ancient society.
35/ The structures of Easter Island work as an astronomical outpost for
extraterrestrial visitors.
36/ the theory that depleted natural resources leading to the fail of
Easter Island actual have a distorted perspective

Questions 37-40:
Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading
Passage for each answer.

Many theories speculated that Easter Island’s fall around the era of the initial European contact. Some say the resources are depleted by a 37…………………………..; The erroneous theories began with a root of the 38……………………….. advanced by some scholars. Early writers did not have adequate 39………………………… understandings to comprehend the true nature of events on the island. The social devastation was, in fact, a direct result of 40……………………. of the first European settlers.

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READING TESTS

TEST 10: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 9, 2025

1/ Blue-footed Boobies

Boobies are a small group of seabirds native to tropical and subtropical oceans throughout the world. Their diet consists mainly of fish. They are specialized fish eaters feeding on small school fish like sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and flying fish. When their prey is in sight, they fold their long wings back around their streamlined bodies and plunge into the water from as high as 80 feet, so streamlined they barely make a splash. They travel in parties of about 12 to areas of water with large schools of small fish. When the lead bird sees a fish shoal in the water, it will signal the rest of the group and they will all dive together. Surprisingly, individuals do not eat with the hunting group, preferring to eat on their own, usually in the early morning or late afternoon.

There are three varieties on the Galapagos: the blue-footed, red- footed, and masked boobies. They are all members of the same family, and are not only different in appearance but also in behaviors. The blue-footed and red-footed boobies mate throughout the year, while the masked boobies have an annual mating cycle that differs from island to island. All catch fish in a similar manner, but in different areas: the blue-footed booby does its fishing close to shore, while the masked booby goes slightly farther out, and the red-footed booby fishes at the farthest distances from shore.

Although it is unknown where the name “Booby” emanates from, some conjecture it may come from the Spanish word for clown, “bobo”, meaning “stupid”. Its name was probably inspired by the bird’s clumsiness on land and apparently unwarranted bravery. The blue footed booby is extremely vulnerable to human visitors because it does not appear to fear them. Therefore, these birds received such name for their clumsiness on land in which they were easy, captured, killed, and eaten by humans.

The blue-footed booby’s characteristic feet play a significant part in their famous courtship ceremony, the ‘booby dance’. The male walks around the female, raising his bright blue feet straight up in the air while bringing his ‘shoulders’ towards the ground and crossing the bottom tips of his wings high above the ground. Plus he’ll raise his bill up towards the sky to try to win his mate over. The female may also partake in these activities – lifting her feet, sky pointing, and of course, squawking at her mate. After mating, another ritual occurs – the nest- building which ironically is never used because they nest on the bare ground. When the female is ready to lay her eggs, they scrape the existing nest away so she can nest on exposed ground. Sun-baked islands form the booby’s breeding grounds. When ready the female Blue Footed Booby lays one to three eggs.

After mating, two or three eggs are laid in a shallow depression on flat or gently sloping ground. Both male and female take turns incubating the eggs. Unlike most birds, booby doesn’t develop brood patches (areas of bare skin on the breast) to warm the eggs during incubation. Instead, it uses its broad webbed feet, which have large numbers of prominent blood vessels, to transmit heat essential for incubation. The eggs are thick-shelled so they can withstand the full weight of an incubating bird.

After hatching, the male plays a major role in bringing fish home. He can bring back a constant supply of small fish for the chicks, which must be fed continuously. The reason is that the male has a longer tail than the female in relation to his body size, which makes him able to execute shallower dives and to feed closer to shore. Then the female takes a greater part as time proceeds. Sooner or later, the need to feed the young becomes greater than the need to protect them and both adults must fish to provide enough.

When times are good, the parents may successfully fledge all three chicks, but, in harder times, they may still lay as many eggs yet only obtain enough food to raise one. The problem is usually solved by the somewhat callous-sounding system of “opportunistic sibling murder.” The first-born chick is larger and stronger than its nest mate(s) as a result of hatching a few days earlier and also because the parents feed the larger chick. If food is scarce, the first born will get more food than its nest mate(s) and will outcompete them, causing them to starve. The above system optimizes the reproductive capacity of the blue-foot in an unpredictable environment. The system ensures that, if possible, at least one chick will survive a period of shortage rather than all three dying of starvation under a more ‘humane’ system.

Questions 1- 6 :

Questions 7 – 9: TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN
7/ Boobies are afraid of human approaching.
8/ Female boobies eat more than the male ones.
9/ When there is not sufficient food, the larger chicks will be fed at the
expense of the survival of its smaller mates.

Questions 10-13

The courtship of the Blue-footed Booby consists of the male flaunting his blue feet and dancing to impress the female. During the dance, the male will spread his wings and stamp his feet on the ground with his bills 10……………………. After mating, the booby’s unusual demeanor continues with ritual 11…………………… that really serves no purpose. When the female Booby lays eggs, the parental boobies incubate the eggs beneath their 12…………………… which contain 13…………………… to transmit the heat, because of the lack of brood patches.

2/ Chinese Yellow Citrus Ant for BIOLOGICAL CONTROL

In 1476, the farmers of Berne in Switzerland decided, according to this story, there was only one way to rid their fields of the cutworms attacking their crops. They took the pests to court. The worms were tried, found guilty and excommunicated by the archbishop. In China, farmers had a more practical approach to pest control. Rather than rely on divine intervention, they put their faith in frogs, ducks and ants. Frogs and ducks were encouraged to snap up the pests in the paddies and the occasional plague of locusts. But the notion of biological control began with an ant. More specifically, the story says, it started with the predatory yellow citrus ant Oecophylla smaragdina, which has been polishing off pests in the orange groves of southern China for at least 1700 years. The yellow citrus ant is a type of weaver ant, which binds leaves and twigs with silk to form a neat, tent-like nest. In the beginning, farmers made do with the odd ants’nest here and there. But it wasn’t long before growing demand led to the development of a thriving trade in nests and a new type of agriculture—ant farming.

Foran insect that bites, the yellow citrus ant is remarkably popular. Even by ant standards, Oecophylla smaragdina is a fearsome predator. It’s big, runs fast and has a powerful nip—painful to humans but lethal to many of the insects that plague the orange groves of Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China. And for at least 17 centuries. Chinese orange growers have harnessed these six-legged killing machines to keep their fruit groves healthy and productive. The story explains that citrus fruits evolved in the Far East and the Chinese discovered the delights of their flesh early on. As the ancestral home of oranges, lemons and pomelos, China also has the greatest diversity of citrus pests. And the trees that produce the sweetest fruits, the mandarins—or kan–attract a host of plant-eating insects, from black ants and sap-sucking mealy bugs to leaf-devouring caterpillars. With so many enemies, fruit growers clearly had to have some way of protecting their orchards.

The West did not discover the Chinese orange growers’ secret weapon until the early 20th century. At the time, Florida was suffering an epidemic of citrus canker and in 1915 Walter Swingle, a plant physiologist working for the US Department of Agriculture, was, the story says, sent to China in search of varieties of orange that were resistant to the disease. Swingle spent some time studying the citrus orchards around Guangzhou, and there he came across the story of the cultivated ant. These ants, he was told, were “grown” by the people of a small village nearby who sold them to the orange growers by the nestful.

The earliest report of citrus ants at work among the orange trees appears in a book on tropical and subtropical botany written by His Han in AD 304. “The people of Chiao-Chih sell in their markets ants in bags of rush matting. The nests are like silk. The bags are all attached to twigs and leaves which, with the ants inside the nests, are for sale. The ants are reddish-yellow in colour, bigger than ordinary ants. In the south, if the kan trees do not have this kind of ant, the fruits will all be damaged by many harmful insects, and not a single fruit will be perfect.

Initially, farmers relied on nests which they collected from the wild or bought in the market where trade in nests was brisk. ‘It is said that in the south orange trees which are free of ants will have wormy fruits. Therefore, the people race to buy nests for their orange trees, ‘wrote Liu Hsun in Strange Things Noted in the South, written about AD 890. The business quickly became more sophisticate. From the 10th century, country people began to trap ants in artificial nests baited with fat. “Fruit growing families buy these ants from vendors who make a business of collecting and selling such creatures, “wrote Chuang Chi-Yu in 1130. “They trap them by filling hogs ‘or sheep’s bladders with fat and placing them with the cavities open next to the ants ‘nests. They wait until the ants have migrated into the bladders and take them away. This is known as ‘rearing orange ants’. “Farmers attached the bladders to their trees, and in time the ants spread to other trees and built new nests. By the 17th century, growers were building bamboo walkways between their trees to speed the colonization of their orchards. The ants ran along these narrow bridges from one tree to another and established nests “by the hundreds of thousands”.

Did it work? The orange growers clearly thought so. One authority, Chi Ta- Chun, writing in 1700,stressed how important it was to keep the fruit trees free of insect pests, especially caterpillars. “It is essential to eliminate them so that the trees are not injured. But hand labour is not nearly as efficient as ant power…” Swingle was just as impressed. Yet despite this report, many Western biologists were skeptical. In the West, the idea of using one insect to destroy another was new and highly controversial. The first breakthrough had come in 1888,when the infant orange industry in California had been saved from extinction by the Australian vedalia beetle. This beetle was the only thing that had made an inroad into the explosion of cottony cushion scale that was threatening to destroy the state’s citrus crops. But, as Swingle now knew, California’s “first” was nothing of the sort. The Chinese had been an expert in biocontrol for many centuries.

The story goes on to say that the long tradition of ants in the Chinese orchards only began to waver in the 1950s and 1960s with the introduction of powerful organic (I guess the author means chemical insecticides). Although most fruit growers switched to chemicals, a few hung onto their ants. Those who abandoned ants in favour of chemicals quickly became disillusioned. As costs soared and pests began to develop resistance to the chemicals, growers began to revive the old ant patrols. They had good reason to have faith in their insect workforce. Research in the early 1960s showed that as long as there were enough ants in the trees, they did an excellent job of dispatching some pests—mainly the larger insects—and had modest success against others. Trees with yellow ants produced almost 20 per cent more healthy leaves than those without. More recent trials have shown that these trees yield just as big a crop as those protected by expensive chemical sprays.

One apparent drawback of using ants—and one of the main reasons for the early skepticism by Western scientists—was that citrus ants do nothing to control mealy bugs, waxy-coated scale insects which can do considerable damage to fruit trees. In fact, the ants protect mealy bugs in exchange for the sweet honeydew they secrete. The orange growers always denied this was a problem but Western scientists thought they knew better. Research in the 1980s suggests that the growers were right all along. Where mealy bugs proliferate under the ants ‘protection they are usually heavily parasitized and this limits the harm they can do. Orange growers who rely on carnivorous ants rather than poisonous chemicals maintain a better balance of species in their orchards. While the ants deal with the bigger insect pests, other predatory species keep down the numbers of smaller pests such as scale insects and aphids. In the long run, ants do a lot less damage than chemicals—and they’re certainly more effective than ex-communication.

Questions 14-18:

Questions 19 – 26 : TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN.

19/ China has the most orange pests in the world.
20/ Swingle came to China in order to search an insect for the US
government.
21/ Western people were impressed by Swingle’s theory of pest
prevention.
22/ Chinese farmers realised that price of pesticides became expensive.
24/ Trees without ants had more unhealthy fallen leaves than those with.
25/ Yield of fields using ants is larger a crop than that using chemical
pesticides.
26/ Chinese orange farmers proposed that ant protection doesn’t work out
of China.

3/ John Franklin: “the discovery of the slowness”

John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14 and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out. he turned his attention to, and in particular to solve the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear- water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent. The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic was an arduous overland journey from Hudson Bay to the shores of the so-called Polar Ocean east of the Coppermine River. Between 1819 and 1822. Franklin and his twenty-strong team covered 5550 miles on foot. Their expedition was a triumph of surveying – they managed to chart hundreds of miles of previously unknown coastline.

There followed a career as a travel writer and salon-goer {‘the man who ate his boots’ was Franklin’s tag-line), a second long Arctic expedition, and a controversial spell as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Then, in May 1845, Franklin set off with two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and 129 men on the voyage that would kill him. In July, the convoy was seen by two whalers, entering Lancaster Sound. Nothing more would be heard of it for 14 years. Had the ships sunk or been iced in? Were the men dead, or in need of rescue? Or had they broken through to the legendary open polar sea, beyond the ‘ice barrier’?

In his personal correspondence and in his published memoirs. Franklin comes across as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with a defining character trait for which there is no historical evidence: (‘slowness’, or ‘calmness’).

Slowness influences not only Franklin’s behaviour but also his vision, his thought and his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness (The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny) – depicts Franklin as a young boy. playing catch badly because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with ‘their way of doing things’. For Nadolny. Franklin’s fated fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment suited to his peculiar slowness.

He describes Franklin as a boy dreaming of the ‘open water and the time without hours and days’ which exist in the far north, and of finding in the Arctic a place ‘where nobody would find him too slow’. Ice is a slow mover. Ice demands a corresponding patience from those who venture onto it. The explorers who have thrived at high latitude and at high altitudes haven’t usually been men of great speed. They have tended instead to demonstrate unusual self-possession, a considerable capacity for boredom, and a talent for what the Scots call ‘tholing’, the uncomplaining endurance of suffering.

These were all qualities which the historical Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny’s concentration and exaggeration of them isn’t unreasonable. Even as an adult, his slowness of thought means that he is unable to speak fluently, so he memorises ‘entire fleets of words and batteries of response’, and speaks a languid, bric-a-brac language. In the Navy, his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way. and gradually earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up his report of an engagement, he replies: ‘When I tell something, sir. I use my own rhythm.’ A lieutenant says approvingly of him: ’Because Franklin is so slow, he never loses time.’

Since it was first published in Germany in 1983. The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 13 languages. It has been named as one of German literature’s twenty ‘contemporary classics’, and it has been as a manual and by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes as diverse as sustainable development, the Protestant Church, management science, motoring policy and pacifism.

The various groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the high-speed culture of Postmodernity. Nadolny’s Franklin appeals to them because he is immune to ‘the compulsion to be constantly occupied’, and to the idea that ‘someone was better if he could do the same thing fast.’ Several German churches have used him in their symposia and focus groups as an example of peacefulness, piety and self-confidence. A centre scheme (a ‘march of slowness’ or ‘of the slow’), inspired by the novel. Nadolny has appeared as a guest speaker for RIO, a Lucerne-based organisation which aims to reconcile management principles with ideas of environmental sustainability. The novel has even become involved in the debate about speed limits on German roads. Drive down an autobahn today, and you will see large road-side signs proclaiming ‘unhurriedness’ a slogan which deliberately plays off the title of the novel.

A management journal in the US described The Discovery of Slowness is a ‘major event not only for connoisseurs of fine historical fiction but also for those of us who concern themselves with leadership, communication and systems-thinking, issues’. It’s easy to see where the attraction lies for the management crowd. The novel is crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctiliousness and profitability: ‘As a rule, there are always three points in time: the right one. the lost one and the premature one’. ‘What did too late mean? They hadn’t waited for it long enough, that’s what it meant.’

Questions 27-32:

Which paragraph A – H contains the following information?
27/ What was Sir John Franklin’s occupation before he went on a career of
the arctic exploration?
28/ A story John Franklin reacted strangely when he met bullies by other
children.
29/ Reason of popularity for the book The Discovery of Slowness
30/ A depiction that Sten Nadolny’s biography on John Franklin is not
much based on facts.
31/ The particular career Sir John Franklin took after his expedition
unmatched before.
32/ what is the central scheme and environment conveyed by the
book The Discovery of Slowness

Questions 33-36:

In his personal correspondence to and in his published memoirs by Sten Nadolny, John Franklin was depicted as a man dedicated to the exploration, and the word of “slowness” was used to define his 33………………. when Franklin was in his childhood, his determination to the 34………………. of the schoolboys was too slow for him to fall into step. And Franklin was said to be a boy dreaming finding in a place he could enjoy the 35………………. in the Arctic. Later in 20th, His biography of the discovery of slowness has been adopted as a 36………………. as for the movement such as sustainable development, or management science, motoring policy.

Questions 37-40:

37/ Why does the author mention “the ice is a slow mover” in the
geological arctic, to demonstrate the idea
A of the difficulties Franklin conquered
B that Franklin had a dream since his childhood
C of fascination with the Arctic exploration
D that explorer like Franklin should possess the quality of being patient

38/ When Franklin was on board with sailors, how did he speak to his
follow sailors
A he spoke in a way mocking his followers
B he spoke a bric-a-brac language to show his languish attitude
C he spoke in the words and phrases he previously memorized
D he spoke in a rhythmical tune to save chatting time

39/ His effort to overcome his slowness in marine time life had finally
won the
A understanding of his personality better
B capacity for coping with boredom
C respect for him as he insisted to overcome his difficulties
D valuable time he can use to finish a report

40/ Why is the book The Discovery of Slowness sold more than a
million copies
A it contains aspects of the life people would like to enjoy
B it contains the information for the flag language applied in ships
C it induces a debate about speed limits German
D it contains the technique for symposia German churches

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READING TESTS

TEST 9: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 9, 2025

1 – Finches on Islands

Today, the quest continues. On Daphne Major-one of the most desolate of the Galápagos Islands, an uninhabited volcanic cone where cacti and shrubs seldom grow higher than a researcher’s knee-Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent more than three decades watching Darwin’s finch respond to the challenges of storms, drought and competition for food Biologists at Princeton University, the Grants know and recognize many of the individual birds on the island and can trace the birds’ lineages hack through time. They have witnessed Darwin’s principle in action again and again, over many generations of finches.

The Grants’ most dramatic insights have come from watching the evolving bill of the medium ground finch. The plumage of this sparrow-sized bird ranges from dull brown to jet black. At first glance, it may not seem particularly striking, but among scientists who study evolutionary biology, the medium ground finch is a superstar. Its bill is a middling example in the array of shapes and sizes found among Galápagos finches: heftier than that of the small ground finch, which specializes in eating small, soft seeds, but petite compared to that of the large ground finch, an expert at cracking and devouring big, hard seeds.

When the Grants began their study in the 1970s, only two species of finch lived on Daphne Major, the medium ground finch and the cactus finch. The island is so small that the researchers were able to count and catalogue every bird. When a severe drought hit in 1977, the birds soon devoured the last of the small, easily eaten seeds. Smaller members of the medium ground finch population, lacking the bill strength to crack large seeds, died out.

Bill and body size are inherited traits, and the next generation had a high proportion of big-billed individuals. The Grants had documented natural selection at work-the same process that, over many millennia, directed the evolution of the Galápagos’ 14 unique finch species, all descended from a common ancestor that reached the islands a few million years ago.

Eight years later, heavy rains brought by an El Nino transformed the normally meager vegetation on Daphne Major. Vines and other plants that in most years struggle for survival suddenly flourished, choking out the plants that provide large seeds to the finches. Small seeds came to dominate the food supply, and big birds with big bills died out at a higher rate than smaller ones. ‘Natural selection is observable,’ Rosemary Grant says. ‘It happens when the environment changes. When local conditions reverse themselves, so does the direction of adaptation.

Recently, the Grants witnessed another form of natural selection acting on the medium ground finch: competition from bigger, stronger cousins. In 1982, a third finch, the large ground finch, came to live on Daphne Major. The stout bills of these birds resemble the business end of a crescent wrench. Their arrival was the first such colonization recorded on the Galápagos in nearly a century of scientific observation. ‘We realized,’ Peter Grant says, ‘we had a very unusual and potentially important event to follow.’ For 20 years, the large ground finch coexisted with the medium ground finch, which shared the supply of large seeds with its bigger-billed relative. Then, in 2002 and 2003, another drought struck. None of the birds nested that year, and many died out. Medium ground finches with large bills, crowded out of feeding areas by the more powerful large ground finches, were hit particularly hard.

When wetter weather returned in 2004, and the finches nested again, the new generation of the medium ground finch was dominated by smaller birds with smaller bills, able to survive on smaller seeds. This situation, says Peter Grant, marked the first time that biologists have been able to follow the complete process of an evolutionary change due to competition between species and the strongest response to natural selection that he had seen in 33 years of tracking Galápagos finches.

On the inhabited island of Santa Cruz, just south of Daphne Major, Andrew Hendry of McGill University and Jeffrey Podos of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have discovered a new, man-made twist in finch evolution. Their study focused on birds living near the Academy Bay research station, on the fringe of the town of Puerto Ayora. The human population of the area has been growing fast-from 900 people in 1974 to 9,582 in 2001. Today Puerto Ayora is full of hotels and mai tai bars,’ Hendry says. ‘People have taken this extremely arid place and tried to turn it into a Caribbean resort.’

Academy Bay records dating back to the early 1960s show that medium ground finches captured there had either small or large bills. Very few of the birds had mid-size bills. The finches appeared to be in the early stages of a new adaptive radiation: If the trend continued, the medium ground finch on Santa Cruz could split into two distinct subspecies, specializing in different types of seeds. But in the late 1960s and early 70s, medium ground finches with medium-sized bills began to thrive at Academy Bay along with small and large-billed birds. The booming human population had introduced new food sources, including exotic plants and bird feeding stations stocked with rice. Billsize, once critical to the finches’ survival, no longer made any difference. ‘Now an intermediate bill can do fine,’ Hendry says.

At a control site distant from Puerto Ayora, and relatively untouched by humans, the medium ground finch population remains split between large- and small-billed birds. On undisturbed parts of Santa Cruz, there is no ecological niche for a middling medium ground finch, and the birds continue to diversify. In town, though there are still many finches, once- distinct populations are merging.

The finches of Santa Cruz demonstrate a subtle process in which human meddling can stop evolution in its tracks, ending the formation of new species. In a time when global biodiversity continues its downhill slide, Darwin’s finches have yet another unexpected lesson to teach. ‘If we hope to regain some of the diversity that’s already been lost/ Hendry says, ‘we need to protect not just existing creatures, but also the processes that drive the origin of new species.

Questions 1- 4 :

Questions 5 – 8: Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each
answer.
On the remote island of Santa Cruz, Andrew Hendry and Jeffrey Podos conducted a study on reversal 5………………… due to human activity. In the early 1960s medium ground finches were found to have a larger or smaller beak. But in the late 1960s and early 70s, finches with 6………………… flourished. The study speculates that it is due to the growing 7………………… who brought in alien plants with intermediate- size seeds into the area and the birds ate 8………………… sometimes.

Questions 10-13 TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN

9/ Grants’ discovery has questioned Darwin’s theory.
10/ The cactus finches are less affected by food than the medium ground
finch.
11/ In 2002 and 2003, all the birds were affected by the drought.
12/ The discovery of Andrew Hendry and Jeffrey Podos was the same as
that of the previous studies.
13/ It is shown that the revolution in finches on Santa Cruz is likely a
response to human intervention.

2- The evolutional mystery: Crocodile survives

Crocodiles have been around for 200 million years, but they’re certainly not primitive. The early forms of crocodiles are known as Crocodilian. Since they spent most of their life beneath water, accordingly their body adapted to aquatic lifestyle. Due to the changes formed within their body shape and tendency to adapt according to the climate they were able to survive when most of the reptiles of their period are just a part of history. In their tenure on Earth, they’ve endured the impacts of meteors, planetary refrigeration, extreme upheavals of the Earth’s tectonic surface and profound climate change. They were around for the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, and even 65 million years of supposed mammalian dominance has failed to loosen their grip on the environments they inhabit. Today’s crocodiles and alligators are little changed from their prehistoric ancestors, a telling clue that these reptiles were (and remain) extremely well adapted to their environment.

The first crocodile-like ancestors appeared about 230 million years ago, with many of the features that make crocs such successful stealth hunters already in place: streamlined body, long tail, protective armour and long jaws. They have long head and a long tail that helps them to change their direction in water while moving. They have four legs which are short and are webbed. Never underestimate their ability to move on ground. When they move they can move at such a speed that won’t give you a second chance to make a mistake by going close to them especially when hungry. They can lift their whole body within seconds from ground. The fastest way by which most species can move is a sort of “belly run”, where the body moves like a snake, members huddled to the side paddling away frenetically while the tail whips back and forth. When “belly running” Crocodiles can reach speeds up to 10 or 11 km/h (about 7mph), and often faster if they are sliding down muddy banks. Other form of movement is their “high walk”, where the body is elevated above the ground.

Crocodilians have no lips. When submerged in their classic ‘sit and wait’ position, their mouths fill with water. The nostrils on the tip of the elongated snout lead into canals that run through bone to open behind the valve – allowing the crocodilian to breathe through its nostrils even though its mouth is under water. When the animal is totally submerged, another valve seals the nostrils, so the crocodilian can open its mouth to catch prey with no fear of drowning. The thin skin on the crocodilian head and face is covered with tiny, pigmented domes, forming a network of neural pressure receptors that can detect barely perceptible vibrations in the water. This enables a crocodile lying in silent darkness to suddenly throw its head sideways and grasp with deadly accuracy small prey moving close by.

Like other reptiles, crocodiles are endothermic animals (cold-blooded, or whose body temperature varies with the temperature of the surrounding environment) and, therefore, need to sunbathe, to raise the temperature of the body. On the contrary, if it is too hot, they prefer being in water or in the shade. Being a cold-blooded species, the crocodilian heart is unique in having an actively controlled valve that can redirect, at will, blood flow away from the lungs and recirculate it around the body, taking oxygen to where it’s needed most. In addition, their metabolism is a very slow one, so, they can survive for long periods without feeding. Crocodiles are capable of slowing their metabolism even further allowing them to survive for a full year without feeding. Compared to mammals and birds, crocodilians have slow metabolisms that burn much less fuel, and are ideally suited to relatively unstable environments that would defeat mammals with their high food demands.

Crocodiles use a very effective technique to catch the prey. The prey remains almost unaware of the fact that there can be any crocodile beneath water. It is due to the fact that when the crocodile sees its prey it moves under water without making any noise and significant movement. It keeps only its eyes above water surface. When it feels it has reached sufficiently close to the target it whistles out of water with wide open jaws. 80 percent of their attempts are successful. They have very powerful jaws. Once the prey trapped in its jaws they swallow it. Their power can be judged from the fact they can kill the wild zebras which come to watery areas in search of water. They do not chew their food. They normally feed on small animals, big fish, birds and even human flesh. As like some water creatures that interact by making sounds crocodiles also use many sounds to communicate with other crocodiles. They exist where conditions have remained the same and they are free of human interference. The crocodile is successful because it switches its feeding methods. It hunts fish, grabs birds at the surface, hides among the water edge vegetation to wait for a gazelle to come by, and when there is a chance for an ambush, the crocodile lunges forward, knocks the animal with its powerful tail and then drags it to water where it quickly drowns. Another way is to wait motionless for an animal to come to the water’s edge and grabs it by its nose where it is held to drown.

In many places inhabited by crocodilians, the hot season brings drought that dries up their hunting grounds and takes away the means to regulate their body temperature. They allowed reptiles to dominate the terrestrial environment. Furthermore, many crocs protect themselves from this by digging burrows and entombing themselves in mud, waiting for months without access to food or water, until the rains arrive. To do this, they sink into a quiescent state called aestivation.

Most of (At least nine species of) crocodilian are thought to aestivate during dry periods. Kennett and Christian’s six-year study of Australian freshwater crocodiles – Crocodylus johnstoni (the King Crocodiles). The crocodiles spent almost four months a year underground without access to water. Doubly labeled water was used to measure field metabolic rates and water flux, and plasma (and cloacal fluid samples were taken at approximately monthly intervals during some years to monitor the effects of aestivation with respect to the accumulation of nitrogenous wastes and electrolyte concentrations. Double found that the crocodiles’ metabolic engines tick over, producing waste and using up water and fat reserves. Waste products are stored in the urine, which gets increasingly concentrated as the months pass. However, the concentration of waste products in the blood changes very little, allowing the crocodiles to function normally. Furthermore, though the animals lost water and body mass (just over one-tenth of their initial mass) while underground, the losses were proportional: on emergence, the aestivating crocodiles were not dehydrated and exhibited no other detrimental effects such as a decreased growth rate. Kennett and Christian believe this ability of individuals to sit out the bad times and endure long periods of enforced starvation must surely be key to the survival of the crocodilian line through time.

Questions 14-20:

Questions 21-26 Complete the summary and write the correct answer (NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER)
In many places inhabited by crocodilians, most types of the crocodile have evolved a successful scheme to survive in the drought brought by a 21……………………… According to Kennett and Christian’s six-year study of Australian freshwater crocodiles’ aestivation, they found Aestivating crocodiles spent around 22……………………… a year without access to 23……………………… The absolute size of body water pools declined proportionately with 24………………………; thus there is no sign of 25……………………… and other health-damaging impact in the crocodiles even after an aestivation period. This super capacity helps crocodiles endure the tough drought without slowing their speed of 26……………………… significantly.

3 – Thomas Harriot The Discovery of Refraction

When light travels from one medium to another, it generally bends, or refracts. The law of refraction gives us a way of predicting the amount of bending. Refraction has many applications in optics and technology. A lens uses refraction to form an image of an object for many different purposes, such as magnification. A prism uses refraction to form a spectrum of colors from an incident beam of light. Refraction also plays an important role in the formation of a mirage and other optical illusions. The law of refraction is also known as Snell’s Law, named after Willobrord Snell, who discovered the law in 1621. Although Snell’s sine law of refraction is now taught routinely in undergraduate courses, the quest for it spanned many centuries and involved many celebrated scientists. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the first discovery of the sine law, made by the sixteenth-century English scientist Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), has been almost completely overlooked by physicists, despite much published material describing his contribution.

A contemporary of Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Johannes Kepler and Galilei Galileo, Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) was an English scientist and mathematician. His principal biographer, J. W. Shirley, was quoted saying that in his time he was “England’s most profound mathematician, most imaginative and methodical experimental scientist”. As a mathematician, he contributed to the development of algebra, and introduced the symbols of ”>”, and ”<” for ”more than” and ”less than.” He also studied navigation and astronomy. On September 17, 1607, Harriot observed a comet, later Identified as Hailey-s. With his painstaking observations, later workers were able to compute the comet’s orbit. Harriot was also the first to use a telescope to observe the heavens in England. He made sketches of the moon in 1609, and then developed lenses of increasing magnification. By April 1611, he had developed a lens with a magnification of 32. Between October 17, 1610 and February 26, 1612, he observed the moons of Jupiter, which had already discovered by Galileo. While observing Jupiter’s moons, he made a discovery of his own: sunspots, which he viewed 199 times between December 8, 1610 and January 18, 1613. These observations allowed him to figure out the sun’s period of rotation.

He was also an early English explorer of North America. He was a friend of the English courtier and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and travelled to Virginia as a scientific observer on a colonising expedition in 1585. On June 30, 1585, his ship anchored at Roanoke Island ,off Virginia. On shore, Harriot observed the topography, flora and fauna, made many drawings and maps, and met the native people who spoke a language the English called Algonquian. Harriot worked out a phonetic transcription of the native people’s speech sounds and began to learn the language, which enabled him to converse to some extent with other natives the English encountered. Harriot wrote his report for Raleigh and published it as A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in 1588. Raleigh gave Harriot his own estate in Ireland, and Harriot began a survey of Raleigh’s Irish holdings. He also undertook a study of ballistics and ship design for Raleigh in advance of the Spanish Armada’s arrival.

Harriot kept regular correspondence with other scientists and mathematicians, especially in England but also in mainland Europe, notably with Johannes Kepler. About twenty years before Snell’s discovery, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had also looked for the law of refraction, but used the early data of Ptolemy. Unfortunately, Ptolemy’s data was in error, so Kepler could obtain only an approximation which he published in 1604. Kepler later tried to obtain additional experimental results on refraction, and corresponded with Thomas Harriot from 1606 to 1609 since Kepler had heard Harriot had carried out some detailed experiments. In 1606, Harriot sent Kepler some tables of refraction data for different materials at a constant incident angle, but didn’t provide enough detail for the data to be very useful. Kepler requested further information, but Harriot was not forthcoming, and it appears that Kepler eventually gave up the correspondence, frustrated with Harriot’s reluctance.

Apart from the correspondence with Kepler, there is no evidence that Harriot ever published his detailed results on refraction. His personal notes, however, reveal extensive studies significantly predating those of Kepler, Snell and Descartes. Harriot carried out many experiments on refraction in the 1590s, and from his notes, it is clear that he had discovered the sine law at least as early as 1602. Around 1606, he had studied dispersion in prisms (predating Newton by around 60 years), measured the refractive indices of different liquids placed in a hollow glass prism, studied refraction in crystal spheres, and correctly understood refraction in the rainbow before Descartes.

As his studies of refraction, Harriot’ s discoveries in other fields were largely unpublished during his lifetime, and until this century, Harriot was known only for an account of his travels in Virginia published in 1588, , and for a treatise on algebra published posthumously in 1631. The reason why Harriot kept his results unpublished is unclear. Harriot wrote to Kepler that poor health prevented him from providing more information, but it is also possible that he was afraid of the seventeenth century’s English religious establishment which was suspicious of the work carried out by mathematicians and scientists.

After the discovery of sunspots, Harriot’ s scientific work dwindled. The cause of his diminished productivity might have been a cancer discovered on his nose. Harriot died on July 2, 1621, in London, but his story did not end with his death. Recent research has revealed his wide range of interests and his genuinely original discoveries. What some writers describe as his “thousands upon thousands of sheets of mathematics and of scientific observations” appeared to be lost until 1784, when they were found in Henry Percy’s country estate by one of Percy’s descendants. She gave them to Franz Xaver Zach, her husband’s son’s tutor. Zach eventually put some of the papers in the hands of the Oxford University Press, but much work was required to prepare them for publication, and it has never been done. Scholars have begun to study them,, and an appreciation of Harriot’s contribution started to grow in the second half of the twentieth century. Harriot’s study of refraction is but one example where his work overlapped with independent studies carried out by others in Europe, but in any historical treatment of optics his contribution rightfully deserves to be acknowledged.

Questions 27-31:

Questions 32-36:

Various modem applications base on an image produced by lens uses refraction, such as 32…………………. And a spectrum of colors from a beam of light can be produced with 33…………………. Harriot travelled to Virginia and mainly did research which focused on two subjects of American 34…………………. After, he also enters upon a study of flight dynamics and 35…………………. for one of his friends much ahead of major European competitor. He undertook extensive other studies which were only noted down personally yet predated than many other great scientists. One result, for example, corrected the misconception about the idea of 36………………….

Questions 37-40:

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READING TESTS

TEST 8: IELTS Actual Reading Test with Answers

Post author By MOCK TESTS ENGLISH
Post date January 9, 2025

1 – Thomas Young The Last True Know-It-All

Thomas Young (1773-1829) contributed 63 articles to the Encyclopedia Britannica, including 46 biographical entries (mostly on scientists and classicists) and substantial essays on “Bridge,” “Chromatics,” “Egypt,” “Languages” and “Tides”. Was someone who could write authoritatively about so many subjects a polymath, a genius or a dilettante? In an ambitious new biography, Andrew Robinson argues that Young is a good contender for the epitaph “the last man who knew everything.” Young has competition, however: The phrase, which Robinson takes for his title, also serves as the subtitle of two other recent biographies: Leonard Warren’s 1998 life of paleontologist Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) and Paula Findlen’s 2004 book on Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), another polymath.

Young, of course, did more than write encyclopedia entries. He presented his first paper to the Royal Society of London at the age of 20 and was elected a Fellow a week after his 21st birthday. In the paper, Young explained the process of accommodation in the human eye —on how the eye focuses properly on objects at varying distances. Young hypothesized that this was achieved by changes in the shape of the lens. Young also theorized that light traveled in waves and ho believed that, to account for the ability to see in color, there must be three receptors in the eye corresponding to the three “principal colors” to which the retina could respond: red, green, violet. All these hypotheses Were subsequently proved to be correct.

Later in his life, when he was in his forties, Young was instrumental in cracking the code that unlocked the unknown script on the Rosetta Stone, a tablet that was “found” in Egypt by the Napoleonic army in 1799. The stone contains text in three alphabets: Greek, something unrecognizable and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The unrecognizable script is now known as demotic and, as Young deduced, is related directly to hieroglyphic. His initial work on this appeared in his Britannica entry on Egypt. In another entry, he coined the term Indo-European to describe the family of languages spoken throughout most of Europe and northern India. These are the landmark achievements of a man who was a child prodigy and who, unlike many remarkable children, did not disappear into oblivion as an adult.

Born in 1773 in Somerset in England, Young lived from an early age with his maternal grandfather, eventually leaving to attend boarding school. He had devoured books from the age of two, and through his own initiative, he excelled at Latin, Greek, mathematics and natural philosophy. After leaving school, he was greatly encouraged by his mother’s uncle, Richard Brocklesby, a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Following Brocklesby’s lead, Young decided to pursue a career in medicine. He studied in London, following the medical circuit, and then moved on to more formal education in Edinburgh, Gottingen and Cambridge. After completing his medical training at the University of Cambridge in 1808, Young set up practice as a physician in London. He soon became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a few years later was appointed physician at St. George’s Hospital.

Young’s skill as a physician, however, did not equal his skill as a scholar of natural philosophy or linguistics. Earlier, in 1801, he had been appointed to a professorship of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he delivered as many as 60 lectures in a year. These were published in two volumes in 1807. In 1804 Young had become secretary to the Royal Society, a post he would hold until his death. His opinions were sought on civic and national matters, such as the introduction of gas lighting to London and methods of ship construction. From 1819 he was superintendent of the Nautical Almanac and secretary to the Board of Longitude. From 1824 to 1829 he was physician to and inspector of calculations for the Palladian Insurance Company. Between 1816 and 1825 he contributed his many and various entries to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and throughout his career, he authored numerous books, essays and papers.

Young is a perfect subject for a biography — perfect, but daunting. Few men contributed so much to so many technical fields. Robinson’s aim is to introduce non-scientists to Young’s work and life. He succeeds, providing clear expositions of the technical material (especially that on optics and Egyptian hieroglyphs). Some readers of this book will, like Robinson, find Young’s accomplishments impressive; others will see him as some historians have —as a dilettante. Yet despite the rich material presented in this book, readers will not end up knowing Young personally. We catch glimpses of a playful Young, doodling Greek and Latin phrases in his notes on medical lectures and translating the verses that a young lady had written on the walls of a summerhouse into Greek elegiacs. Young was introduced into elite society, attended the theatre and learned to dance and play the flute. In addition, he was an accomplished horseman. However, his personal life looks pale next to his vibrant career and studies.

Young married Eliza Maxwell in 1804, and according to Robinson, “their marriage was a happy one and she appreciated his work,” Almost all we know about her is that she sustained her husband through some rancorous disputes about optics and that she worried about money when his medical career was slow to take off. Very little evidence survives about the complexities of Young’s relationships with his mother and father. Robinson does not credit them, or anyone else, with shaping Young’s extraordinary mind. Despite the lack of details concerning Young’s relationships, however, anyone interested in what it means to be a genius should read this book.

Questions 1 -7 TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN

1/ “The last man who knew everything” has also been claimed to other
people.
2/ All Young’s articles were published in Encyclopedia Britannica.
3/ Like others, Young wasn’t so brilliant when growing up.
4/ Young’s talent as a doctor surpassed his other skills.
5/ Young’s advice was sought by people responsible for local and national
issues.
6/ Young took part in various social pastimes.
7/ Young suffered from a disease in his later years.

Questions 8 – 13
Choose NO MORE THAN 3 WORDS AND/OR 1 NUMBER from
the passage for each answer.

8/ How many life stories did Young write for the Encyclopedia Britannica?
9/ What aspect of scientific research did Young focus on in his first
academic paper?
10/ What name did Young introduce to refer to a group of languages?
11/ Who inspired Young to start his medical studies?
12/ Where did Young get a teaching position?
13/ What contribution did Young make to London?

2- Can Scientists tell us: What happiness is?

Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state. Esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman has spearheaded an effort to study the science of happiness. The bad news is that we’re not wired to be happy. The good news is that we can do something about it. Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn’t been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.

A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form “pods” to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science.

But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of haziness and classifying the virtues? Aren’t these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as “the power of positive thinking”. His plan to stop the new science floating “on the waves of self- improvement fashion” is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below.

And this takes us back to our evolutionary past Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals. Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: “Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what’s wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn’t work in the modem world”.

Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than success. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. Of the six universal emotions, four anger, fear, disgust and sadness are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral). According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lectures, the negative emotion each tells us “something bad has happened” and suggest a different course of action.

What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientist studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain. The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain’s evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history.

Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain’s reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the “wanting” parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.

H In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition and it’s no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

Questions 14-20: which paragraph A-H contains

14/ An experiment involving dividing several groups one of which received positive icon
15/ Review of a poorly researched psychology area
16/ Contrast being made about the brains’ action as response to positive or negative stimulus
17/ The skeptical attitude toward the research seemed to be a waste of fund
18/ A substance that produces much wanting instead of much liking
19/ A conclusion that lasting happiness is hardly obtained because of the
nature of brains
20/ One description that listed the human emotional categories.

Questions 21-25 write the correct answer (NO MORE THAN
4 WORDS OR 1 NUMBER)
A few pioneers in experimental psychology study what happens when lives go well. Professor Alice divided doctors, making a tricky experiment, into three groups: besides the one control group, the other two either are asked to read humanistic statements about drugs or received 21……………………… The latter displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Since critics are questioning the significance of the 22……………………… for both levels of happiness and classification for the virtues. Professor Seligman countered in an evolutional theory: survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into the way of thinking for what’s wrong because we have a 23…………………………. There is bountiful of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply built in the human psyche. Later, at Iowa University, neuroscientists studied the active parts in brains to contrast when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When positive images like 24………………………… are shown, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant image, the response comes from 25………………………… of the brain.

3 – Grimm’s Fairy Tales

For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red- hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence.

Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travellers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasure was “Aschenputtel” -Cinderella. Marie Hassenpflug was a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Snow White”, and “Sleeping Beauty”, among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian tales.

Questions 27-32: YES – NO – NOT GIVEN

27/ The Grimm brothers believed they would achieve international fame.
28/ The Grimm brothers were forced to work in secret.
29/ Some parents today still think Grimm fairy tales are not suitable for
children.
30/ The first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales sold more widely in England
than in Germany.
31/ Adults like reading Grimm’s fairy tales for reasons different from those of children.
32/ The Grimm brothers based the story “Cinderella” on the life of
Dorothea Viehmann

Questions 33-35:

33/ In paragraph 4, what changes happened at that time in Europe?
A Literacy levels of the population increased.
B The development of printing technology made it easier to publish.
C Schools were open to children.
D People were fond of collecting superb picture books.

34/ What changes did the Grimm Brothers make in later editions?
A They made the stories shorter.
B They used more oral language.
C The content of the tales became less violent.
D They found other origins of the tales.

35/ What did Marie Hassenpflug contribute to the Grimm’s Fairy tales?
A She wrote stories.
B She discussed the stories with them.
C She translated a popular book for the brothers using her talent for
languages.
D She told the oral stories that were based on traditional Italian stories.

Questions 36-40: Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

36/ Heinz Rolleke said the Grimm’s tales are “German” because the tales
37/ Heinz Rolleke said the abandoned children in tales
38/ Bernhard Lauer said the writing style of the Grimm brothers is universal because they
39/ Jack Zipes said the pursuit of happiness in the tales means they
40/ Bruno Bettelheim said the therapeutic value of the tales means that the
fairy tales

A reflect what life was like at that time
B help children deal with their problems
C demonstrate the outdated system
D tell of the simplicity of life in the German countryside
E encourage people to believe that they can do anything
F recognize the heroes in the real life
G contribute to the belief in nature power
H avoid details about characters’ social settings.

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